Get out of the cab

Islam | Some Muslim taxi drivers want government support for their objection to hauling alcohol | Mark Bergin

For the past several years, dozens of airline passengers per month have landed in Minnesota, collected their checked baggage, and stepped unwittingly into a small slice of Shariah (Quran-based) law. Many Muslim taxi cab drivers at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport have refused service to travelers carrying alcohol, claiming the Quran forbids transporting this "mother of all evils."

Through August of this year, the number of customers complaining to the airport about such rejections climbed to 77 per month—tourists with fine wines, businessmen with duty-free whiskey, jet-lagged vacationers with miniature bottles from the plane. About 70 percent of the airport cab drivers are Muslim, most of them immigrants from Somalia. "We have people sometimes who are refused by cab after cab after cab," said Patrick Hogan of the Metropolitan Airports Commission. "That's created a problem."