Khan and his Coney Island Avenue Project spent lonely days outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Sunset Park after 9/11, demanding the release of the frightened people threatened by the feds with deportation if they wouldn’t turn informant. During a deposition in a civil-rights lawsuit, when he was asked what he thought of a movie that insulted the Prophet Muhammad, the secular progressive activist went into 700 years’ worth of history of the Indus River Valley. Khan draws a straight line between fighting reactionaries in Pakistan in his youth to fighting the power structure in post-9/11 New York. Both fought back.
“I was a person of interest! Osama bin Laden was a person of interest!” he said over breakfast at the restaurant. “But I was the one who opposed them—not just here, but back there, too!”
Back there was no joke. Men he calls “religious extremists” put “three bullets in me.” Khan was tortured in prison. But after 9/11, he said, “it was worse here.”
Khan had two locks on his door. He and his wife “had plans for what to do if the police came. We had attorneys. We lived in fear.”
It was a time when the NYPD remade itself in the image of its deputy commissioner for intelligence, David Cohen, who had matriculated from the CIA. As reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman would reveal, the police launched a breathtakingly broad initiative to spy on Muslim New York without suspicion of any crime, without regard for suspicion of any crime.
In 2002, Cohen placed a serving CIA officer, Larry Sanchez, in charge of NYPD penetration of entire neighborhoods. Muslim academic associations were particular targets for surveillance and infiltration: the police, in one unforgettable instance, sent an undercover officer on a 2008 whitewater rafting trip with Muslim students from CCNY. The cops uncovered shocking revelations like how they “prayed at least four times a day.” In New Brunswick, New Jersey, where the NYPD has no jurisdiction, Cohen ran a surveillance operation on the campus of Rutgers University, where, as it happens, I went to college.
A mile east of Little Pakistan, Brooklyn College’s Muslim students were described as a “tier one” danger. Included in the next tier down was LaGuardia Community College, where my mother taught for most of my life, and where the police claimed an organization aligned with al-Qaeda “wanted to revive the student group,” according to Apuzzo and Goldman’s pathbreaking 2013 book Enemies Within. Somehow my tiny Jewish mother was safe around her students.