PRIVATE LIVES, PUBLIC PLACES : Calling to the Faithful on Alien Shores

In a Sizzler restaurant on South Vermont, two elderly men sit at their plates of salad in the early evening and go over their memories, as brothers do when they are close. The balmy nights by the Nile, the pyramids in the distance, the moonlight and warm breezes while walking through Cairo. “You never know on what soil you will die,” Muslims say. Who could have known then of this anonymous, faraway night?

Between them, the Drs. Hassan and Maher Hathout have 24 letters after their surname. They come from a tradition where such things are honored--not made rich necessarily. But treated “with due respect.” Their father was a schoolteacher, a headmaster in the last years; he, too, was treated “with due respect.” And they have come to a land where, as they see it, Muslims are largely presented as Urban II presented them in the 11th Century. “They are dogs,” said the Pope. “Chaff for eternal fire.” He was, Dr. Hassan Hathout points out with gentle irony, known as Urban the Blessed.

In these days of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, the intifada, Iran, it is hard not to think of the Islam of the fist: desert-spawned, military-minded, lean, ascetic. And as hard to put that image together with the courtly Drs. Hathout, leaders of the Islamic Center of Southern California, cheek by jowl with the Sizzler.

They were at the mosque for the last prayers of the day. Just before 7, the call to the faithful rang around the long, low rooms of the converted storage center. Five times a day, the same call rings out from mosques into city streets all over the world--in Arabian lands, Afghanistan, Malaysia. Not Vermont Avenue, however: “Who is interested in that noise?” says Maher Hathout, with the worried care of a homeowner not wanting to wake his neighbor with a lawn mower.

The faithful, when they arrive, present a rare array of colors, sizes, costumes. Pakistanis like slender greyhounds, swarthy barrel-chests from the East, black American converts. There are as many walks as costumes: Some swagger, others scuttle like crabs. Hassan Hathout, with the bearing of a stiff British colonel, contrasts with his younger brother, Maher, who rolls from side to side like a stately galleon. Shoes, heaped outside the prayer room, tell a score of tales: cheap flip-flops, down-at-heel clunkers, street-smart sneakers, thin Hollywood loafers. How great a leveler it is when men kneel, forehead to the ground--a line of backsides, humbled and equal before God.

Ten thousand families belong to the center. On Sunday, 1,500 crowd in to study, talk and pray. They come to forget their fears outside, to forget the hatred that has torn apart homelands and brought many to these alien shores. Alas, there are Americans who see their own land thus; they have found another way through Islam.

Even here, there are whiffs of the desert that gave life to Islam: the courtesy, one man to another, born of a time when to be without others meant certain death. The tradition of hospitality lingers. In the desert, the traveler was always offered protection and care. In the graceful arches remembered in the tacky wooden alcove, in the beauty of the Koranic script, the past endures.

“What do I miss in Egypt?” Maher Hathout sighs wistfully. “The intimacy--worrying about your cousins, your cousins’ cousins, your cousins’ cousins’ cousins. . . . “ Who can wonder that so many in the desert that is a modern city have found refuge in this other brotherhood?

Maher Hathout came to America long ago, to Buffalo in 1960. Buffalo? From Cairo? “It was not a piece of cake,” he says with masterly understatement. Now he has his brother and his brother’s family.

All of his life, Hassan Hathout dreamed of giving his time to Islamic studies, and to reaching out to be understood: “So people know that we’re not all terrorists, not murderers, not to be feared--but nice gentlemen.” He and his family moved here two years ago, after 20 years as a professor of obstetrics in Kuwait, 20 years of honor, “with due respect.” It is not as strange a move as it seems. He has always been an outsider--an Egyptian in the British Empire, a non-Kuwaiti in Kuwait.

“The whole Earth is my homeland,” Hassan Hathout says. “It is God’s Earth, not man’s.” Others who felt as he did roamed here once. The Earth, they said, was not theirs to sell. Perhaps, after all, the Drs. Hathout are just coming home.