Past year challenging for Madawaska Muslim ‘I would like to enjoy life here, says businessman

Cetin Abdurrahman, a Muslim from Turkey, opened his dry-cleaning business in Madawaska eight days before the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

He has thought of selling during the past year, but he holds tenaciously to the small establishment. The racks in his 13th Avenue shop are still far from full. He even lowered prices to draw business, yet customers still stay away.

The past year has been a period when he has felt the prejudice of the times because of his nationality.

Abdurrahman, 36, who has been living in the United States for 12 years, bought Rite Way Cleaners in August 2001 and opened his business that Labor Day weekend. The dry-cleaning establishment in Madawaska is the only enterprise he owns.

Shortly after Sept 11, 2001, his business was down 60 percent.

“It’s better, and I am still hoping it will get even better,” Abdurrahman said last month. “It hasn’t been a good year. It’s definitely been a hard year. I do have customers that keep coming.

“Like him,” he said as a Fort Kent man entered to pick up his order.

“Bad news gets around faster, and it stays longer,” he said of the news that spread last year about his being a Muslim.

Abdurrahman is a Turkish citizen living in the United States with permanent visa status. He said he intends to seek U.S. citizenship in the near future. Before coming to Madawaska, he worked and operated businesses in New York City and Myrtle Beach, S.C., after arriving in the United States as a 24-year-old. He has been in the dry-cleaning business, a family business, since he was 16 in his native Turkey.

Raised in Sinop, Turkey, the home of a U.S. Air Force base, the businessman participated in NATO exercises when he was in the Turkish army.

Looking at a poster hanging on the wall of his shop, Abdurrahman still feels badly about what happened in New York City and at the Pentagon.

“It does not matter how many years will go by,” he said. “Those acts were a shameful thing for humankind.

“Just terrible.”

All that does not seem to allay local fears about him.

“I liked New York, it was my home,” he said. “Now, I am trying to make a living here. But I can’t spend my life trying to make people understand me. All I do is work and go home.

“I would like to enjoy life here,” Abdurrahman said. “I am making the best of it.”