Old mining town elects Muslim mayor

GRANITE FALLS, Wash.—Granite Falls residents are suspicious of any newcomers, let alone a Muslim native of Pakistan who moved to this rugged, blue-collar mining town to open his own bar.

But 54-year-old Haroon Saleem has thrived, winning over the town with hard work and an easy smile. He has become so popular that, on Nov. 3, he won the mayor’s job in a landslide, getting 61 percent of the more than 800 votes cast—a result that residents say would have been inconceivable not long ago.

“In the old Granite Falls, there were no minorities. It was a rough, rough, logging town. Any outsider, whether a minority or somebody from Everett, was the same. It was very difficult to be accepted in this town,” said Sharon Ashton, a close confidant of Saleem.

Saleem said he was nervous about being accepted, and hired a white assistant manager to ease local concerns when he opened his bar in 2000.

But he was embraced virtually from the start.

“That tells you how good and great of a community Granite Falls is,” he says with a slight accent. “They didn’t care ... I am who I am, and people love me for that, and I just love people. People know that I am smart, I am a businessman. In the big scheme of things, all these qualities have made me, got me to where I am today.”

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Saleem said community members reached out, letting him know he was one of them. No one seems to notice that his wife, Bushra, attends social events in a traditional shalwar dress.

Perhaps it helps that he owns one of the local watering holes, Saleem laughs. He admits that running the Timberline Cafe, with beer ads plastered everywhere, is not exactly a pious following of Islam, which forbids alcohol consumption. But Saleem’s story isn’t typical.

He emigrated from Rawalpindi, a city next to Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital—where his father’s business tanked and family feuds were a constant worry—to work in Iran as a seaman and then to the U.S. in 1979 on a visitor visa. When the visa expired, he decided to risk staying in the country.