Doc Star of the Month: Yusuf Abdurahman, 'Accept the Call'

For many years Yusuf Abdurahman, the charismatic protagonist of Eunice Lau's Accept the Call, seemed to be living the American Dream. A refugee who fled civil war in the '90s, Abdurahman went from a life filled with famine and death in Somalia to one of hope and possibility in Minnesota. One of the founders of what is now the largest Somali community in the United States, Abdurahman married, had kids, and today works as a translator and facilitator at a Head Start office. Though divorced, he continues to lovingly devote himself to his seven children - including his eldest, Zacharia, the reason Lau picked up her camera.

At the age of 19, Zacharia was arrested in an FBI counterterrorism sting, which split both the son from his family (Zach is currently serving a 10-year sentence) and the father from his community. A practicing Sufi, Abdurahman became convinced that the metastasizing Wahhabi influence in the neighborhood mosques was at fault for his son’s radicalization. (And Zach was indeed radicalized. Though the FBI's heavy-handed tactics could be considered entrapment in many people's eyes — including those of Abdurahman’s activist daughter Ikraan, who continues to advocate for her brother's release — the fact that Zach had made a prior, ultimately failed, attempt to leave the country to join ISIS in Syria has never been in dispute.) In other words, Abdurahman believed that his own community needed to take a hard look at itself. Which, needless to say, is a radical POV that could easily be construed as victim-blaming in this current age of aggressive anti-immigrant policies and dubious law enforcement surveillance of non-white folks.

Documentary spoke with this deep-thinking, courageously clear-eyed "Doc Star of the Month" a week before the film’s January 20th premiere on PBS' Independent Lens.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.