NYPD's own imam helps Muslims and US engage

Sharmila Devi, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: November 16. 2009 12:28AM UAE / November 15. 2009 8:28PM GMT

The imam Khalid Latif talks about an auditorium in the NYU student centre that is a potential venue for an event for young Muslims. In addition to speaking at functions, he is a regular organiser of such gatherings. Bryan Derballa for The National

The shooting frenzy by an American army psychiatrist that left 13 people dead in Fort Hood, Texas, this month left many of his fellow Muslims with a feeling of dread and fearing a backlash.

Regardless of whether the murderer turns out to be a lone psychopath or conspired with terrorists, Muslims prepared for their religion to be put on trial once again in the newspapers and on the airwaves and internet.

Journalists soon started telephoning the imam Khalid Latif, hoping to get a comment from the Muslim chaplain of the New York Police Department (NYPD) and New York University (NYU). Ordinarily, Mr Latif welcomes the opportunity to explain patiently that a crazed murderer no better represents Islam than the bomber who killed 168 people in Oklahoma City in 1995 is the real face of Christianity.

But Mr Latif’s time last week was consumed by another matter that he could not ignore, and which cuts to the core of his multifaceted duties as a chaplain: mediating in a domestic violence case between a young girl and her family.

He expected the Fort Hood killings would take up his time eventually, not least because of a controversial article written by Tunku Varadarajan, an NYU business professor, for Forbes magazine. Mr Varadarajan coined the phrase “going Muslim”, a play on the expression “to go postal”, to describe an angry killing spree by a disgruntled worker. But he wrote that the Muslim would probably act in a calculated, premeditated and “messianic” fashion. The article provoked outrage among all faiths within NYU’s overwhelmingly liberal community.

Mr Latif was not disheartened. He believes his outreach and connections, forged in the years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have helped, slowly, to create greater understanding about Islam within the United States.

“There are always people ready to point the finger at Islam, but there are just as many who don’t,” he said. “There’s room for Muslims to productively engage and it’s up to us to engage.”

Mr Latif, born in the United States to Pakistani parents, is only 27, but he is in the vanguard of a new generation of Muslims who are defining what it means to follow their faith and be faithful US citizens. He was the chaplain at Princeton University in New Jersey before helping to found NYU’s Islamic Centre. Up to 30,000 people listen to his khutbahs (public prayers) and sermons available via podcasts. He constantly travels around the country giving lectures.

He has also led his Muslim students into warm ties with their Jewish counterparts at NYU and he was confident that these would not be broken in the Fort Hood fallout.

On a cold but bright morning in late October, Mr Latif and some Muslim students met with some Jewish students led by Yehuda Sarna, a rabbi at the Bronfman Centre for Jewish Student Life at NYU.

The two groups were discussing the programme for an upcoming dinner and discussion evening, part of a series of events for Muslim and Jewish students called Bridges. The half-dozen people sat around a small table as bright sunlight streamed through the room’s large windows, dispelling any remembrance of the chill outside.

“Maybe we should focus on the way people experience their religion rather than the theoretical?” asked Mr Sana, who is NYU’s Jewish chaplain. “Practically, as in food, dress, within the community. Why we do this stuff!”

The Muslim and Jewish students giggled and approved the title “Why we do this stuff” as the general theme of their next Bridges evening. They also warmed to the idea of a discussion of intentionality within religion, to explore how much of one’s faith was free will or simply mechanical.

“I love the idea of conscious decision versus the habitual,” Miriam, a hijab-clad student, said to the group, which included young men in yarmulkes.

Up next for debate was the exact format of the Bridges evening and whether students should split into pairs or larger groups to discuss the practice and meaning of their faith.

“You know, we don’t have the same thing as Jewish groups have,” Mr Latif said. “I’ve seen in Jewish institutions how two people read a text to each other and then discuss it. Muslims tend more to follow an authoritative leader. It’s not that we can’t do it, but we’re just not as familiar with it.”

The group soon agreed on a timetable for the evening including Muslim and Jewish prayers before and after the dinner.

“Rabbi Sana is a great guy and I’m so happy to be working with him,” Mr Latif said on a short walk to another NYU building, where he would prepare the sermon for Friday prayers due in a couple of hours.

Mr Latif delivered his first sermon when he was only 18 during his first year at NYU studying Middle Eastern studies and political science. He also spent two years at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut studying for a master’s in theology. He still looks like the students he administers to, dressed in baggy, casual clothing with only a black skullcap suggesting hidden depths.

NYU’s Islamic Centre is temporarily housed in a church basement because its permanent home is still under construction. It is packed for Friday prayers with not only NYU students but Muslims from the local community.

Mr Latif stood in front with a microphone. He wore a white turban and blue robe, which hung over his short and slight frame and spilt over his feet. But his usually quiet and earnest demeanour was replaced by a more confident and urgent persona. His voice rose in intonation to put the emphasis on the end of his sentences.

His sermon, delivered in English, was about the responsibility that came with power, how relationships were positioned according to power, and the scope for abuse that lay within. “We must look back to our character to understand why the world does not believe us to be good people,” he said in the address, which also encompassed the necessity to treat everyone with respect, mercy and compassion.

Mr Latif said his spiritual awakening started when he was in his early teens. In outward appearances he seemed just “another middle-class American ‘spoiled brat’” who wore trendy labels. “Up until I was a freshman [in the first year at university], I was clean-shaven, I had really long Pantene Pro VS hair, I wore a lot of J Crew- and Abercrombie & Fitch-type clothing. I had a sports car, a Lexus SE400; it wasn’t expensive, a ’92 model, but it was my favourite car,” he said, laughing at his former image.

“I had a picture of me standing in front of it and if you saw it, you’d be like, wow, you’re like a cheesy, floppy guy!”

He was a popular and good student with high grades who did not experiment with alcohol or any other forbidden vices. He described his New Jersey childhood as the youngest of three children to Kashmiri parents as typical of the Arab middle-class experience in the United States. His father was a doctor and his mother worked in his medical practice. His brother became an accountant and his sister a lawyer. There were only a couple of other Muslims in his school class, but he never believed he suffered from any racism or discrimination until he was 18 and had grown a beard out of religious conviction. One day when he was driving with friends, he was stopped by the police, who discovered the car’s registration had expired. Six police cars surrounded his vehicle before he was ordered out.

“I was really upset and I told my dad they only pulled us over because we’re Muslim,” Mr Latif said. “My dad said: ‘Khalid, how would anybody know you’re a Muslim? You have a beard, but you don’t look like what people think Muslims look like. You look kind of Italian, Puerto Rican or Hispanic’.”

Just as he was beginning to feel comfortable with his renewed Muslim identity, the World Trade Center was destroyed on September 11. The next day, his family urged him not to cover his head in public for fear he would suffer violent retaliation for being a Muslim. In class soon afterwards, he noticed a Muslim girl without her usual face veil, just a headscarf.

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt more wretched than I felt then. I thought, here I am hiding who I am and aside from that, this girl doesn’t feel secure enough or comfortable enough to do something that she wants to do and I’m not providing her with any solace,” he said. “It just really tore me apart inside.”

But 9/11 did make Mr Latif and many other Muslim Americans of his generation much more conscious of the need to communicate with the rest of US society. The task was, and is, complicated by the divisions among Muslims of different ethnicities and traditions.

“We didn’t go out and seek to proactively engage people post-9/11. The Qur’an was the most popular text in every library, every bookstore, and people wanted to know,” he said. “But we were thinking about our own security and our own selves, as opposed to what do we do to alleviate the issues that are here and now.”

He said many Muslim Americans, like him, did not meet Muslims from different ethnic backgrounds until going to university. “The first Muslim I met as a freshman at NYU was an Indonesian guy with a really scraggly beard and he was carrying a surfboard!”

He understood that it was easier for new immigrants to socialise with other Muslims of the same origin and to create mosques modelled on the ones back home, rather than become more civically engaged with the public.

“Three decades ago it would have been easier to say we’re not really from this country anyway”; why become more engaged? “Participating in an election process that is governed by a law that doesn’t have God as the sovereign is probably impermissible anyway, so we just keep to ourselves.”

Mr Latif would love to see a US Muslim organisation modelled along the lines of Hillel, the foundation for Jewish campus life, which organises activities and events to help students “find a balance in being distinctly Jewish and universally human”.

“After 9/11, we missed out on a huge opportunity to humanise ourselves,” he said. “We allowed a small group of people who were most definitely in the wrong to dictate what Islam meant to millions and millions of people and no one really stood up and said otherwise,” he said. “You had people who condemned the acts, who condemned the violence, but beyond the condemnation there wasn’t a realisation of those words in something active, on a broader scale.”

He was optimistic, however, that Muslim Americans would become more prominent and influential within society at large.

“We’ll see in the next five to 10 years a wave of institutions that will accommodate Muslims’ needs living in the United States,” he said. “We’ll see a lot of coalition-building and policy changes that affect those coalitions as a whole as opposed to affecting Muslims only. People will become more strategic as they become more aware of how things function here.”

sdevi@thenational.ae