Linda Sarsour is, in every sense of the phrase, a woman in a hurry. Only 35, she has already helped to partly dismantle the New York Police Department’s program of spying on the city’s Muslims and has worked with officials in City Hall to close public schools for the observance of two of Islam’s most important holy days, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha. From her base at the Arab American Association of New York, the nonprofit group in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where she is the executive director, Ms. Sarsour has taken on such issues as immigration policy, voter registration, mass incarceration, Islamophobia and the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactic. She has emerged in the last few years not only as one of the city’s, and the country’s, most vocal young Muslim-American advocates, but also as a potential — and rare Arab-American — candidate for office.“I feel like I’ve been able to bring a voice to this community they’ve never heard before,” she said not long ago.
The voice she brings to New York’s Muslims, a diverse group of Arabs, Southeast Asians, Africans and African-Americans, is loud, strident and inflected with both street smarts and the tropes of “intersectionality,” as the trending term has it. That means Ms. Sarsour has sought to speak not only for those who share her religion, but also for others — women, gays, prison inmates, victims of racial profiling — facing the problems that concern her.She is deeply involved in the Black Lives Matter movement, having helped to organize an April march from New York to Washington led by a group called Justice League NYC — an offshoot of Mr. Belafonte’s Gathering for Justice — to honor Eric Garner, Akai Gurley and other black men killed by the police. More recently, as part of a project she calls Respond With Love, she has raised more than $100,000 to help rebuild black churches that burned down, some by arson, after the church massacre in Charleston, S.C.
“When you look at the Muslim community and its relationship with the police, it’s very similar to the black community’s relationship,” said Tamika Mallory, a former top aide to the Rev. Al Sharpton who works with Justice League NYC and other groups. “It’s all about finding common ground. It’s like Linda says, ‘I’m gonna help y’all get your people straight and I expect you to come help me get mine straight.’ ”
Not that that has been easy. While Ms. Sarsour likes to talk — with a talent for praising herself without sounding overly self-aggrandizing — about helping to organize events like December’s shutdown of the Barclays Center in Brooklyn after a grand jury did not indict the white officer in the case involving Mr. Garner, she acknowledges that she has encountered resistance from some Arab Muslims who feel that she should save her energy for helping her own kind.
“There are people who disavow her work because they think it’s not enough in the community,” said Zead Ramadan, a former board chairman of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in New York. “The older, more conservative faction will say, ‘Oh, she’s too liberal,’ or, ‘That’s not how a Muslim woman should act.’ But if there’s anyone who clearly represents the religion and who can make it into a political seat in New York, it’s Linda.”
Besides, Mr. Ramadan added, “You are rarely going to meet someone who is so Brooklyn.”
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