A calling to Princeton

Khalid Latif is the University’s first Muslim chaplain

By Mark F. Bernstein ’83
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Last month, Princetonians of all faiths gathered in the memorial garden outside Chancellor Green to mark the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, listening as the wisdom of the three great Abrahamic religions was invoked to ease the pain of loss. Rabbi Julie Roth, executive director for the Center for Jewish Life, read the 23rd Psalm, then the Rev. Stephen L. White of the Episcopal Church of Princeton read selections from the Gospel of Matthew. They were followed by Khalid Latif, recently appointed as the University’s first Muslim chaplain, who prayed in Arabic from the Quran, chanting the prayer first in Arabic in a beautiful singing voice, then reading it in English:
Oh you who believe seek help with patient perseverance and prayer, for God is with those who patiently persevere. And do not speak of those who are slain in God’s way as dead; nay, they are alive, but you do not perceive. And we will most certainly try you with somewhat of fear and hunger and loss of property and lives and fruits; but give good news to the patient. Those who, when a misfortune befalls them, say: Surely we belong to God and to Him we shall surely return. They are those on whom descend blessings and mercy from their Lord, and those are the followers of the right course.
 
Latif had arrived on campus early in September, and the memorial service made for a daunting first appearance. He chose his words carefully, hoping they would convey an important and universal message. “In the Quran there are lots of references to patience during hardship and not allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed. You need to persevere and keep faith in God when [things] get beyond our ability to understand.”
 
Five years ago, Latif was a student at New York University, just a mile or so from Ground Zero, and watched with thousands of fellow students in sickened silence as the second plane hit the World Trade Center. What followed was a tense and uncertain time for Muslims in New York, he recalls, and because there was no Muslim chaplain yet at NYU, Latif and fellow students took responsibility for each other, even going so far as to organize a buddy system for their physical security. The experience, he says, “gave me a sense of how important it is for there to be a central authority figure, such as a chaplain, to ensure that needs are met for the whole community.”

In preparing for Princeton’s memorial service, Latif’s thoughts drifted toward the future. “We’re all going to be leaving this world someday,” he says. “Thinking back on a time when so many people left this world, I found myself thinking also about our own individual time here, about my time, and what I’m doing with it. Am I using the time well?”
 
Princeton’s decision to hire a Muslim chaplain had been in the works for more than a year, says Paul Raushenbush, associate dean of religious life, a response both to requests from Muslim students and in recognition of their growing numbers on campus. Because the University does not ask students about their religious affiliation, there is no way to get an accurate count, but Raushenbush estimates that approximately 200 undergraduate and graduate students are Muslims. “We wanted to make sure that when Muslims applied [to Princeton], they got the sense immediately that we valued their presence here,” Raushenbush says.

Latif, who will split his time between Princeton and NYU, where he is also a chaplain, grew up in a Muslim enclave of northern New Jersey, the son of Pakistani immigrants who came to the United States during the 1970s. His father, a doctor, had read Islamic writings, but like many immigrants Latif’s parents tended to downplay the culture of their old country. They did not practice their faith with much assiduity until his older siblings began to take a greater interest in Islam during their college years, when Latif was about 12 years old.

Inspired by his siblings’ example, Latif began to read the Quran and study Islam on his own, to the point that he was invited to deliver sermons during Friday services at area mosques while still a teenager. “It seemed,” he says, “like something that fit into what I was doing already.”
 
Nevertheless, after graduating from NYU in 2004 with honors in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, he intended to become a lawyer, and completed one year of law school before deciding to change careers. “The idea of being a lawyer didn’t appeal to me,” recalls Latif, a slight man with a well-trimmed beard who usually wears the Muslim Kufi, or skullcap. “On my first day at law school, a professor told us that the legal system is not based on justice; it’s based on who has more money. I don’t know if he was trying to be cynical or funny, but it was something that stayed with me. I decided that there were other things I could do with my skills that might be more effective in helping people on a mass level.” He applied to the Hartford Seminary, the only seminary in the country that offers an accredited program in Islamic chaplaincy, where he is completing his certification.

Although chaplains may help lead worship, they also provide services unique to a university setting. During his chaplaincy training, Latif says, he has gained much insight into the issues faced by American Muslims, particularly students. The questions brought to a chaplain “aren’t always going to be religion-based,” he says. His work includes counseling people on issues of drug or alcohol abuse (Muslims are expected to abstain from both drugs and alcohol) and domestic violence. According to Abdullah Antepli, assistant director of the Islamic chaplaincy program at Hartford Seminary, Muslim chaplains are now in great demand by American universities, though few are available.
 
Perhaps the highlight of Latif’s spiritual journey was a physical journey he made last winter on the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. This being the 21st century, he described his feelings and impressions in a blog (http://icnyuchaplain.blogspot.com) he began at the suggestion of Beliefnet.com, a multidenominational religious Web site, and which, time permitting, he hopes to continue. Latif’s home page on the NYU Islamic Center’s Web site also contains a number of audio files of his past lectures in Arabic, on topics ranging from “The Rights of Children” to “Preparing for Ramadan.”
 
Robert Coolidge, a Ph.D. candidate in religion at Princeton who has been active in the Muslim Students Association, has known Latif for several years through his participation in Islamic groups in northern New Jersey. He describes the new chaplain as “soft-spoken and calm, but not in a meek way. He walks and talks with a sense of personal strength. He is definitely one of those people who could be described as one whose actions speak louder than their words.” The need for a chaplain was strong, Coolidge says: “Muslim religious life pretty much rises or falls on whether there is leadership. With a chaplain, there is someone to take some of the responsibility but also provide a resource and, hopefully, a motivation for students to increase their religious life and provide momentum for the whole Muslim student population.”
 
Wasim Shiliwala ’09, who grew up in the same area of New Jersey as Latif, agrees. Until Latif arrived, he says, “there was not someone responsible for the Muslim community. At interfaith events, there would be a rabbi from the Center for Jewish Life and a minister for the Christians, but no one for Muslims who was as knowledgeable as a chaplain would be.”
 
Although the majority of Muslim students are believed to be Sunni (as Latif himself is), members of the largest branch in Islam, those from Shiite, Sufi, or other backgrounds are readily accepted within the Muslim Students Association. Any such differences, Latif says, will not impede his work. Being chaplain makes him “responsible for all the Muslims on campus,” he says, “and not just those from a specific cultural background.”

Because the nearest mosque is almost six miles from Princeton, and because of the inherent transience of campus life, it has been difficult for Muslim students to develop a strong bond with one another, Latif says. That is something he hopes to foster. “It’s hard for individuals to establish community when they’re together only nine months out of the year,” he suggests. “They need a constant factor that is there.”
 
In his first weeks at the University, Latif has continued the practice of daily prayers in a room set aside for Muslim prayer on the third floor of Murray-Dodge Hall, as well as larger and better-attended jumaa services each Friday, the Muslim Sabbath. As Latif sees it, however, his call includes reaching out to students of other faiths as well.

Already, Latif and Rabbi Roth have held a joint study session on the meaning of fasting in Islam and Judaism. On Sept. 29, during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and just before the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur — both of which require fasting — about 70 Jewish and Muslim students sat down together for a Sabbath meal at the Center for Jewish Life, and then discussed what fasting means in their faiths and lives. Latif introduced himself to the group, explaining that he hoped to be a resource for all Princeton students, and the atmosphere was warm. He and Roth also were exploring the possibility of holding a Muslim-Jewish retreat during fall break.
“That’s why it is so great to have Khalid here,” Raushenbush says, “because he has been so engaged in constructive dialogue between groups.”
 
While splitting his time between Princeton and NYU, Latif also teaches an interfaith educational program at two New York high schools: one a Jewish day school in Manhattan, the other an Islamic school in Queens. He continues to deliver Friday sermons at Islamic centers and hospitals in the area. To deepen his own spiritual background, he is studying privately with Islamic scholars and working to memorize the Quran, while continuing to pursue his master’s degree in Islamic studies, with a concentration in Muslim-Christian relations, at Hartford. “The importance of working together in a collaborative effort should transcend any distinctions of faith or culture,” he says. “There are tensions all over the world. A lot of people could find common ground in faith if they would let themselves do so.”
 
Latif believes that it is incumbent upon Muslims to do more to educate others about their faith. “Muslims have a tendency to be passive,” he says. “It’s easy to say, ‘Don’t look at the people [who are proclaiming the tenets of Islam], look at the [Quran].’ But people do look at the people who are proclaiming what they believe Islam means. It’s important that we learn the text, and once we learn it, to be sure that we are acting in accordance with it. Muslims have to mobilize so that we’re the ones teaching it.”
Mark F. Bernstein ’83 is PAW’s senior writer.

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Sorting Out Life as Muslims and Marines

- By ANDREA ELLIOTT

Few people ever see Ismile Althaibani’s Purple Heart. He keeps the medal tucked away in a dresser. His Marine uniform is stored in a closet. His hair is no longer shaved to the scalp. It has been 20 months since he returned from Iraq after a roadside explosion shattered his left foot. He never expected a hero’s welcome, and it never came — none of the balloons or hand-written signs that greeted another man from his unit who lived blocks away.

Mr. Althaibani, 23, was the last of five young marines to come home to an extended family of Yemeni immigrants in Brooklyn. Like the others, he grew accustomed to the uneasy stares and prying questions. He learned not to talk about his service in the company of Muslim neighbors and relatives.
“I try not to let people know I’m in the military,” said Mr. Althaibani, a lance corporal in the Marine Corps Reserve.

The passage home from Iraq has been difficult for many American troops. They have struggled to recover from the shocking intensity of the war. They have faced the country’s ambivalence about a conflict in which thousands of their fellow soldiers have been killed or maimed. But for Muslim Americans like Mr. Althaibani, the experience has been especially fraught. They were called upon to fight a Muslim enemy, alongside comrades who sometimes questioned their loyalty. They returned home to neighborhoods where the occupation is commonly dismissed as an imperialist crusade, and where Muslims who serve in Iraq are often disparaged as traitors.

Some 3,500 Muslims have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan with the United States armed forces, military figures show. Seven of them have been killed, and 212 have been awarded Combat Action Ribbons.
More than half these troops are African-American. But little else is known about Muslims in the military. There is no count of those who are immigrants or of Middle Eastern descent. There is no full measure of their honors or injuries, their struggle overseas and at home.

A piece of the story is found near Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, where two sets of brothers and a young cousin share a singular kinship. They grew up blocks apart, in the cradle of a large Muslim family. They joined the Marines, passing from one fraternity to another. Within the span of a year and a half, they had all gone to Iraq and come home.

Ismile’s cousin Ace Montaser sensed a new distance among the men at his mosque on State Street. He described it as “the awkward eye.” Ismile’s older brother Abe, a burly New York City police officer, learned to avoid political debates. Their cousin Abdulbasset Montaser took a different approach. He answered questions about whether he served in Iraq with a feisty, “Yeah, we’re going to Yemen next!” He has helped recruit for the Marines and boasts about his cousin’s medal to the neighbors. “I want every Muslim in the military to be recognized,” said Mr. Montaser, a corporal. “If not, people will feel they’re not doing their part.”

Their service bears some resemblance to that of Japanese and German immigrants who fought for the United States in World War II. But for Muslims of Arab descent, the call to serve in Iraq is complicated not only by ethnic ties, but by religion. Islamic scholars have long debated the circumstances under which it is permissible for Muslims to fight one another. The arguments are intricate, centering on the question of what constitutes a just war.

In Brooklyn, those fine points are easily lost. Here, many immigrants say that killing Muslims is simply wrong, and they cite the Koran as proof. Their opposition to the war is rooted as much in religion, they say, as in Arab solidarity. The same week that Abe Althaibani headed to Iraq with the 25th Marine Regiment, his wife joined thousands of antiwar protesters in Manhattan, shouting,“No blood for oil!”“It was my people,” said his wife, Esmihan Althaibani, a regal woman with luminous green eyes. “I went because it was Arabs.”

Yet the American military desperately needs people like her husband: Arabic speakers with a religious and cultural understanding of the Middle East. They have become crucial figures in Iraq, serving as interpreters, conduits and even buffers between soldiers and civilians. The Althaibanis and Montasers knew they would be useful. They wanted to help bring change to Iraq. They did not know how much the war would change them.

Brooklyn to Yemen and Back

As boys, the Althaibanis and Montasers lived in two worlds. They took summer trips to the pastoral villages of their Yemeni ancestors, and spent winters shoveling snow off Brooklyn stoops. They attended Koran classes, and rooted passionately for the Knicks. They saw themselves as both American and Arab, as brash Brooklyn kids in the halls of John Dewey High School, and respectful Yemeni sons at the dinner table.

One by one, they graduated from high school and joined the Marine Corps Reserve. Some of their parents found it odd, even disappointing. The sons of other Yemeni immigrants tended to follow their fathers into commerce, or better yet, studied law and medicine. But for the young men of this family, the first to be born in America, military service became an honorable rite. It offered discipline and adventure. It also promised a new kind of respect from other Americans. Starting in 1992, eight of the family’s young men enlisted, almost all of them before Sept. 11.

The prospect of fighting in a Muslim country unsettled the five cousins who were deployed to Iraq, recalled an uncle, Naji Almontaser.“It was very heavy on their conscience,” said Mr. Almontaser, 47, a banquet captain at the New York Hilton. “I kept pounding on them that when you go there you have to do good.”
It helped that four of them went to Iraq together, with the same two units. Still, they found themselves thrust into a daunting role. Their fluency in Arabic made them invaluable. But it also laid bare the horrors of war. They heard what their comrades could not. A frantic sequence of foreign words was, they knew, a girl crying out that her father was dead. “It’s like you’re part of two different worlds,” Abe Althaibani said. “You’re part of the military thing, yet you totally relate to this country you just invaded. You’re not as foreign as everyone else.”

He recalled the evening he tried to calm a bleeding woman as her children lay dying several feet away. He crouched next to her, near a bridge in Nasiriya, talking softly in Arabic. Ismile Althaibani, Abe’s younger brother, remembers insisting that a mentally disabled prisoner be allowed to ride in the passenger seat of a truck, without a sandbag over his head, when a group of men were transported from Abu Ghraib to another prison. Their cousins Abdulbasset Montaser and Khalil Almontaser were stationed in Babylon. There, Mr. Montaser befriended Iraqi workers. “I tried to look out for them a little more, help them a little more than the average soldier,” he said. But at times, such gestures brought unease. One day, as Mr. Montaser walked the young workers to lunch, a gunnery sergeant yelled, “Get away from them,” he recalled. He and his cousins learned to ignore the pejoratives of war, words like “hajji,” “camel jockey” and “Johnny Jihad.” They understood that their fellow marines had to dehumanize the enemy in order to carry on, Abe Althaibani said.
But for them, the task was far more trying. “I couldn’t distance myself,” Mr. Althaibani said. “Sometimes I wanted to.”

Thousands of miles away, on Court Street in Brooklyn, his mother met a similar challenge. She and her husband live in a rambling apartment adorned with Persian rugs and gold-lettered passages from the Koran. In the living room, a giant Sony television holds court. The television was Sadah Althaibani’s tether to her sons. But unlike other military mothers, who might watch CNN or Fox, Mrs. Althaibani followed the war on Arab news channels that showed far more graphic images, and were decidedly more critical of the United States.

Day after day, she and Abe Althaibani’s wife, Esmihan, would sit anchored to the plastic-covered couches, watching. “You see what’s going on over there,” said Esmihan Althaibani, 26. “The casualties on both sides. Iraqis speaking for themselves, saying, ‘We didn’t want to get invaded.’ They would hold dead babies with their heads blown off.” One afternoon in May, the television filled with the image of a blood-soaked sidewalk in Baghdad. “Look, look,” said Sadah Althaibani, 65, a petite woman with a stubborn frown. “They’re cleaning the blood off the ground.”

When Mrs. Althaibani talks about the war, she sounds like other American parents upset by their children’s service. She laments that her sons had to fight while President Bush “was playing with his dog.” She has no doubt that the occupation was driven by a quest for oil. But among Yemeni immigrants, Mrs. Althaibani found that she could not speak openly about her sons’ deployment. Muslim Americans have been vehemently opposed to the war: Of roughly 1,800 surveyed by the pollster John Zogby in 2004, more than 80 percent were against it.

Mrs. Althaibani told people that her sons were working as translators, not as marines in combat. On her television, she had seen reports of Shiites fighting Sunnis, but she clung to the idea that Muslims should not kill each other.“It’s a sin,” she said. “Nobody kills other Muslims. They’re like brothers.”

After Combat, Questions

The question that shadows the Montasers and Althaibanis is whether they killed anyone. The same question haunts any soldier returning from combat. But for Muslims, the reckoning is different.
Abdulbasset Montaser, 23, a slim, soft-spoken man, said he fired his weapon only in self-defense, and never at targets he could distinctly see. “I never had to kill anyone face to face,” he said. He believed that battling with the insurgents was justified because they were not following the rules of Islam. What disturbed him were the civilians caught in the cross-fire.
“It’s not that I feel guilty going out there, but you’re fighting your own people in a way,” he said.

Of the five cousins, no one saw heavier combat than Ismile (pronounced ish-MY-el) Althaibani, who was stationed in Falluja in the fall of 2004, during the American offensive against the insurgents there. He worked in convoy security with the First Marine Division. “If you’re out there — no matter your culture, your religion — and somebody shoots at you, what do you do?” Mr. Althaibani said. “It’s either him or me. That’s how I come to terms with it.” Still, he was troubled by his belief that Islam prohibits killing.

Over dinner at an Italian restaurant one evening last month, Mr. Althaibani sat hunched at the table, spinning his cellphone like a top. Abdulbasset Montaser sat across from him. They were the only ones in their family to enlist after Sept. 11, when deployment to the Middle East was a clear possibility. They never expected the war that followed. When asked if he was proud of his service in Iraq, Mr. Althaibani thought for a moment. “It’s mixed feelings, right?” he said, looking at his cousin. Mr. Montaser nodded silently.

Mr. Althaibani was awarded a Combat Action Ribbon, in addition to the Purple Heart. He did not want to talk about whether he killed anyone, or about the violence he witnessed. “You just try to forget,” he said.

A Marine Transformed

The oldest of the group, Abe Althaibani, came home with much of his former character intact. He had the same easy laugh. He still cleaned his plate at dinner. But there were hints of change. He was more on edge, his mother noticed. He had acquired the habits of his comrades: he smoked Marlboro Reds and took to dipping tobacco.

What struck his wife was something less common among marines: Mr. Althaibani spoke Arabic with a new Iraqi accent.
He told his relatives little about his role in the war. When prodded, he would sometimes say that he served in “civilian affairs.”
In fact, Mr. Althaibani had worked on secret missions around Iraq with two counterintelligence teams.

He had been trained as a rifleman. But soon after he arrived at his base in Nasiriya in April 2003, he became a full-time interpreter, going on raids, assisting with interrogations and working undercover to cultivate sources. To fit in, he grew a beard and wore a long, checked scarf popular among Iraqi men.

The irony of Mr. Althaibani’s evolution did not escape him: He assumed, by outward appearances, a more traditionally Arab identity with the Marines than he ever had growing up among Yemenis.
The greatest challenge of his service, he said, was “the acting.”

“It’s like you gotta be somebody you’re not sometimes in order to get information,” he said. “It’s basically like you’re a fake, you’re a fraud. But you have to think you’re doing this in order for good things to happen.”

Mr. Althaibani, 28, wanted only to unwind when he came home five months later. Other marines he knew had struggled to readjust to civilian life. “It’s hard,” he said. “You’re out there giving people orders, and you come here and the lady at the checkout is giving you attitude.”

He eventually became a police officer, taking a path that three other marines in his family plan to follow.
One sunny afternoon in June, Mr. Althaibani guided his black Nissan Maxima through the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn. Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” floated from the speakers. The playgrounds, schools and cafes of Mr. Althaibani’s youth passed in slow sequence.

As he drove, Mr. Althaibani began recounting the crowning achievement of his team in Iraq: the capture of a suspected Baath party official who was believed to have taken part in the deadly ambush of Pfc. Jessica Lynch’s convoy.
“I felt like I was doing something,” he said.

The Iraqi captive, Nagem Sadoon Hatab, was detained at Camp Whitehorse near Nasiriya in June 2003. During an interrogation, he would accept water only from Mr. Althaibani, the marine recalled.

Two days later, another marine dragged Mr. Hatab, who was covered in his own feces, by the neck outside his cell and left him lying naked in the heat, according to court testimony. He was found dead hours later. An autopsy showed that he had suffered a broken neck bone, broken ribs and blunt trauma to the legs.

A Marine Corps major and a sergeant were charged with assaulting Mr. Hatab. Both were acquitted of the charge, though the major was found guilty of dereliction of duty and maltreatment in the case and the sergeant was convicted of abusing unidentified Iraqi prisoners.

Mr. Althaibani testified at the sergeant’s trial. He spoke about the case later with a shrugging detachment, saying he had witnessed no abuse and believes that the prosecutors were intent on “crucifying the Marines.”
Looking back on the war, he feels the greatest loyalty toward his fellow marines.

“I wanted to get out there, do what I had to do and get home,” he said. “I had no choice. Even if there was a choice — you’re going to train with these guys and leave them?”

The Marine Corps is “like a cult,” he said. “You went together and you come home together.”

No Looking Back

It is difficult to picture Ace Montaser at war. He has a boy’s face, with flushed cheeks and aqua eyes that dance about.
When he rolls up his sleeve, the image hardens. Sprawled across his arm is a tattoo of the Grim Reaper. Below it, a ribbon of letters spells “Brooklyn,” and across the top are the words, “Trust no one.”
He got the tattoo when he came home from Iraq. It signaled his entry into another kind of battle, one between him and the traditions of his family.

From the time Mr. Montaser was 12, he remembers his mother telling him he would marry a girl from Yemen. He never liked the idea. “They say you just build love,” he said. A bride had also been chosen for his brother, Abdulbasset, and the family began talking of a dual wedding before the two men left for Iraq, with different units, in the spring of 2003. While he was away, Mr. Montaser, 25, served mostly as a translator in Nasiriya, training the Iraqi police and rebuilding schools. Iraq felt strangely familiar. He studied the streets, the cars, the way people dressed, and kept thinking of Yemen, where he had spent stretches of his youth. In young Iraqis, he saw himself. He would look at them and wonder, had his father not moved to Brooklyn, would his life have been so different?

He was most haunted by the children, those who begged in the street and others who lay dead in a hospital he visited.
“I just saw how precious life was,” he said. “To come back alive, I feel I have the right to do whatever I want to do.”
Soon after he returned that September, Mr. Montaser fell in love with a woman from the Bronx. She was Muslim, but did not cover her head. She was of Arab descent, but not Yemeni. Their relationship was not the first rebellion staged by Mr. Montaser, who prefers the nickname Ace to his birth name, Abdulsamed. His parents went ahead with the original wedding plan. Nine months later, they persuaded him to fly to Yemen, where they own a house in the capital, Sana. The night before the wedding, he plotted his escape.

He quietly packed his camouflage Marine bag. At midnight, he slipped out of the house. On a dresser, he left a note saying that he had gotten cold feet and was traveling south to the port city of Aden. “That’s the good thing about being a marine,” he said. “You plan. You’re made for these situations. That’s how I got out.” He hailed a cab to the American Embassy, where a Marine staff sergeant ushered him inside. The next day, he flew back to New York. “What he realized is the Marine Corps is his other family,” said Gunnery Sgt. Jamal Baadani, an Egyptian immigrant and a mentor of Mr. Montaser.

A week later, Mr. Montaser married his girlfriend, Nafeesah, at City Hall. They live in the Bronx with her parents.
Mr. Montaser is now studying to become a radio producer. For a long time, he did not speak to his parents. He is trying to mend the relationship, but has no interest in returning to Yemen.

“I don’t care what I left behind,” he said. “There’s nothing for me there. Everything’s in America.”

A Quiet Return

Ismile Althaibani was the last to come home. He arrived at his parents’ doorstep without warning on Thanksgiving day in 2004, leaning on a pair of crutches. They answered the bell and embraced him. He knew there would be none of the balloons and signs that welcomed a Puerto Rican marine in the neighborhood.
“It’s just decorations,” Mr. Althaibani said.

Nine days earlier, on Nov. 17, Mr. Althaibani was in Falluja, riding in a predawn convoy to pick up detainees. He had said a prayer before the trip, reciting the Koran’s first verse. If he survived, he promised God, he would become a better Muslim.
Suddenly, a bomb planted by the insurgents exploded under his truck. Shrapnel flew into his face and dug deep inside his left foot. Blood trickled from his ears. A friend dragged him from the wreckage, and soon he was on a helicopter to Baghdad.

Mr. Althaibani almost never tells the story of his injury. Few of his relatives know what happened. When he was awarded the Purple Heart at a ceremony at Floyd Bennett Field, in Brooklyn, he invited only his brother Abe and a couple of friends.
His mother does not know the name of his medal.

“You can’t say ‘purple heart’ in Arabic,” said Mr. Althaibani. But word traveled. About six months after he returned, Mr. Althaibani was standing outside Yemen Cafe on Atlantic Avenue, sipping tea. A stranger walked up, shook his hand and asked him, in Arabic, if he had killed Iraqis. None of the marines in Mr. Althaibani’s family welcomed the attention. But for Ismile, it was especially uncomfortable.

A lean man with brown, searching eyes, Mr. Althaibani is always standing off to the side. He is quiet by nature, but returned from Iraq even more withdrawn, his relatives observed. He smiled less, and smoked often.
One afternoon in May, he sank into a couch in his family’s living room. His father, who is a maintenance foreman at a building in Manhattan, sat across from him.

“Iraq is wrong — 100 percent,” his father said, speaking in English to this reporter. “Nobody support the war in Iraq.”
Ismile looked away. He had never asked his father what he thought of the war.
Weeks later, the young man stood in a park in Downtown Brooklyn, smoking a cigarette.
“He’s proud of me,” he said of his father. “He don’t express himself a lot.”
His foot had finally healed. He had been attending a local mosque, and would soon begin training at the New York City Police Academy.

The physical traces of his time in Iraq were all but gone. His hair fell loosely over his forehead. A soft goatee shaded his face. The only hint of his service hung from two silver chains that disappeared beneath his shirt. They held the aluminum tags of his military identity: name. Blood type. Social Security number.
Stamped across the bottom, in the same block letters, was the word “Muslim.”

Back

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Building Bridges

The Drammehs foster dialogue between Muslim & Jewish children

- By JEFF TAMARKIN

Shireena and Sheikh Moussa Drammeh

Sheikh Moussa Drammeh and his wife, Shireena Drammeh, vividly remember the day they opened the Islamic Leadership School in the Parkchester section of the Bronx. Sheikh Drammeh and several others had been at the building all night laying tiles, taking care of last-minute details, excitedly awaiting the arrival of the first students. It was a crisp, clear morning; they couldn't have asked for a more perfect opening day for the borough's first Muslim school.

Around 9 a.m., "Our telephone started ringing off the hook," recalls Drammeh, "and someone said, 'Are you crazy? Do you know what's going on?'" The date was Sept. 11, 2001.

Drammeh, 43, who serves as the school's principal, knew immediately that nothing would go as planned: not for him, his family or his new school. But he knew what he had to do. "We had an emergency meeting," he says. "Some people suggested we close. I told them, "Today is our opening day. We cannot be defeated by terrorists. This is the most beautiful day for a full-time Islamic school to open. We're not closing. This is a day when we must tell people what Islam is and who we are.'"
That is exactly what the Drammehs have been doing ever since.

Sheikh Drammeh, who came to the Bronx from Senegal 20 years ago, and Shireena, 34, originally from Guyana, have been married for 10 years. They both work in the financial sector and are the parents of three young children, one with epilepsy.
But the couple somehow manages to find the time to serve as community leaders, running not only the school but its parent organization, the Islamic Cultural Center of North America (www.iccna.org), of which Shireena is president and Sheikh Drammeh is chairman.

The idea for the center and school was born of need.
"Our youngest girl was three-and-a-half," says Shireena, "and we were very concerned that there was no Islamic school in the Bronx. So we decided, along with other individuals, that since we have a mosque here [in Parkchester], this was the best time and place to start an Islamic school because there are a lot of Muslims in the community."

The school opened with 13 students, and by the end of its first year, 77 were enrolled, all Muslims of diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds. Today the Islamic Leadership School, which encompasses pre-K to 10th grade and plans to expand to 12th, teaches well over 100 students. Lacking a background in the educational field, says Shireena, "Everyone involved has basically had to learn everything that we needed to make the school a success."

Not only is the school a success today, but the Islamic Cultural Center itself is thriving. It now offers 12 different programs to assist community members, in areas as wide-ranging as health and social services, English-as-a-second-language instruction, interfaith programs, stress management, day care and more.

The center also offers financial counseling, encouraging Muslims, particularly recent immigrants, to invest.
"There are a lot of Muslims who will not put their money in conventional banks," says Drammeh. "When you come from a third world country, sometimes you can't get to your money. [You think that] if you put it in there you're not going to see it again. So most immigrants don't trust banks." To help alleviate that fear, the center launched a Muslim credit union.

Among the other programs offered by the center is one called Trees of Life — which will see one new tree planted "for each soul lost on 9/11," says Drammeh — and a Muslim-Jewish student dialogue. Partnering with the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan, the Islamic Leadership School recently arranged for its students to meet with counterparts from the Kinneret Day School, a Jewish institution in Riverdale, the Bronx.

"The Jews are people who have suffered, who have been dealt injustice," says Drammeh. "And [the museum's] goal is to remind people that we cannot forget about this. We can heal and move on, but we have to understand enough so that it doesn't happen again."

"Both schools enjoyed it," says Shireena about the cultural exchange. "They call each other at home and want to know when they're going to see each other again."

"The kids got along very well," confirms Paul Radensky, the museum's educator for Jewish schools. "You had the [Muslim] girls with the head scarves and the [Jewish] kids with the yarmulkes and that didn't seem to bother anybody. Adults have a lot of baggage, but children don't.

"Sheikh and Shireena Drammeh are both wonderful, loving, caring people," Radensky adds. "[Sheikh Drammeh's] got a real vision that Jews and Muslims have to live together in peace and have to get to know one another, and that you've got to start with the children. I think he's onto something."

Indeed, the Drammehs and their work have been embraced wholly by their neighbors. "Our school, from Sept. 11 until this day, has never had a single bias attack," says Drammeh. "Not even a telephone call. Nothing.

"People regard us as a member of the community. People regard us as those who are against injustice as much as anybody else. I never fail to realize the good heart of the majority of Americans. America is the only place where, when you see a tragedy on TV, people don't care what religion, what nationality, they rush in to help. You can never find more soft-hearted people than the Americans."

Being able to contribute so much, not surprisingly, has been greatly rewarding to this immigrant couple.
"Living here for 20 years and being very active in the community, from business to religion, I know how many lives are not lived to fulfill their dreams," says Drammeh. "New York is the best place to fulfill your dreams. If you cannot do it, you can only blame yourself."

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