A Call to Prayer

They are dislocated Palestinians or Jordanians, Taiwanese with wanderlust, Malaysians in pursuit of advanced academic degrees, Egyptians with entrepreneurial ambitions. They were born in big, garrulous cities in Nigeria or Pakistan, or in tiny desert towns, ravels of huts huddled against North African sirocco and Asiatic simoom. They are Americans who abandoned their parents’ faith, or big-city African Americans, declaring allegiance to Allah in urban mosques. American Muslims are a heterogeneous group, often with little in common except, in varying degrees, a devotion to the Koran and the rules of Islam. With the United States at war with a predominantly Muslim nation, they worry about the stereotypes that many Americans have of Islam and about a possible backlash.

In this article, Times staff writers interview a Malaysian-born immunologist, a Pakistani college professor, an African-American consultant, an American-born psychotherapist and a Chinese restaurateur.

At precisely 5:24 p.m., Osama Kamil’s digital watch sounded a beep.

“You will excuse me,” Kamil said. “It is time for me to pray.”

Every day, five times a day, Kamil kneels on a small mat and for four minutes invokes a higher power. Kamil has been known to spread his mat in a parking lot or a department store or on the sidewalk.

At the Harvard University Medical School in Boston, he uses a small room adjacent to his laboratory.

It is never an imposition, Kamil says: “I have to pray.”

For this 35-year-old Muslim, born in Malaysia to Egyptian parents, prayer “constantly reminds us about our duties, both as human beings and as professionals who are supposed to do the best at what they are doing.”

What Kamil is doing is balancing a devout Muslim family life with a demanding professional life.

In accordance with Muslim tradition, his wife, Sanaa, wears a head covering. The two oldest of their four children have already begun the ritual of daily prayer that starts at age 7. By age 10, the children will feel as comfortable as their parents when they enter the mosque, the Muslim place of worship.

Kamil’s work life incorporates a similar dedication. An immunologist with a bachelor’s degree from Cairo University and a Ph.D. from Tufts University, Kamil is seeking to discover exactly how the human body responds to the HIV virus, which causes AIDS.

The field has given him a new sense of wonder about humanity, he says.

“It increases my faith, because the more you get to know an area like biology, the more your faith in God, who created everything, increases,” he adds.

The faith that permeates Kamil’s life sets him apart from many people in his adopted country.

People sometimes give him strange looks when he prays in public, and often they point at his wife’s covered head.

This kind of curiosity fails to ruffle Kamil. But what does irritate him is when Americans engage in “ignorant” misconceptions, “such as relating terrorism only to Muslims.”

Kamil says his family has not experienced discrimination in this country. But he worries that because of the war “there might be a different view of us. People tend to generalize.”

He does not think the United States should be involved in the Middle East, “whatever is going on there.”

Kamil is vice president of MAYA, the Muslim-Arab Youth Assn. He may return to the Islamic world if “it would increase the understanding and promote the respect of Muslims,” he says.

“I think understanding is the most important thing.”

And respect? Kamil smiles. “Respect will come after understanding,” he says.

In the nearly two decades that he has lived in this country, Mohammad Zaheer has found that following traditional Islamic practices is not easy.

Take the matter of the ban on eating the flesh of swine, which Zaheer says is the one Islamic dietary law to which he assiduously tries to adhere.

“When you go out to a restaurant, you see them frying everything on the same grill--hamburgers, bacon. So I just close my eyes,” says Zaheer, a soft-spoken, slightly built man who lives in Columbia, Conn.

Then again, Zaheer confesses, he has never been a strict practitioner of his faith, even though both his grandfather and great-grandfather were religious teachers who could quote the entire Koran by heart.

On the days when he must rise before dawn to get ready to teach classes at Manchester Community College, Zaheer seldom neglects to include in his morning rituals the first of the five daily prayers that Muslims are obligated to offer to Allah.

But the 60-year-old economics professor from Pakistan readily admits that prayer before sunrise and the prayers in the evening are the only ones he performs with any regularity.

Zaheer is more on the order of what is known as a “secular Muslim,” one who believes in the basic precepts of Islam and tries to follow most of the fundamental laws and duties but who does not wrap himself up in the all-enveloping traditional practices.

He seldom attends a mosque. In addition, he admits to having been woefully negligent of the Islamic obligation to provide his three sons with a proper religious education.

He also has never sought to conform his professional life to his religious beliefs.

“I’m not trying to make a difference in the world because I’m a Muslim,” he said. “I’m trying to make a difference because I’m a teacher.”

On the community college campus where he has taught for the past 10 years, he is no more recognizable as a Muslim than any of his colleagues might be recognizable as Christians or Jews.

At times, the secularity of his life has drawn the scorn of some of his more orthodox Muslim associates. When the statewide Pakistan-American Cultural Assn. that he founded and heads included a Middle Eastern belly-dance in a program, Zaheer was accused of promoting non-Islamic activities.

“In fact, that belly-dance was arranged by one of my Egyptian colleagues,” he says. “In Egypt, belly-dancing is quite common although, as you may know, in Saudi Arabia and some other Arab countries, no kind of dancing is allowed.”

One of the hardest things about being a Muslim in the United States, Zaheer maintains, is the almost total ignorance most Americans have of the faith and the almost total lack of interest they demonstrate in learning anything about it.

“As we Muslims see it, Islam is simply the continuation of Judaism and Christianity,” he says. “Jesus, for example, is a prophet in our religion, although we do not look on him as the son of God.”

Ameer Rashid had been a loyal member for 17 years of the Nation of Islam, a militant sect commonly known as the Black Muslims, when the organization underwent dramatic changes in 1975.

A few months after the death that year of Elijah Muhammad, the sect’s leader, his son and successor Warith Deen Mohammed of Chicago dropped its anti-white policies and introduced members to a whole new world of standard-brand Islam.

Rashid learned for the first time that there were Muslims of all nationalities. “I had no idea Muslims were in Russia and China, for instance,” says Rashid, who lives in Los Angeles.

Chairs were removed from the worship halls so that members could touch their hands and heads to the floor in the proper Muslim way of praying, he recalls.

“The Nation of Islam had functioned more as a social organization that was dedicated to uplifting the black man in America,” he says.

Rashid, now 52, successfully made the transition, even welcomed it.

Today he is a leading member of Masjid Ibaadillah, a storefront African-American mosque on West Jefferson Boulevard, one of five masajid in Los Angeles that follow the reforms encouraged by W. D. Mohammed.

Rashid, who said he researches and sells information to developers and investors on foreclosed properties, was born and reared in Los Angeles. His family, mostly Christian, belonged to a black Pentecostal denomination, the Church of God in Christ. “I drifted away from the church when I was a teen-ager. I wasn’t angry. It just didn’t have any fulfillment for me,” he recalls.

In 1958 he joined the small but growing Nation of Islam.

Rashid had never been involved in civil rights protests, but he said he was attracted by the dynamic oratory of Elijah Muhammad and his chief spokesman, Malcolm X, and the self-disciplined manner of the members. “They were so different from the gamblers, pimps and people running in the streets.”

Young black men in the Nation of Islam, on the other hand, “felt not only dignified but important. We were always clean-cut, wore suits and ties on a daily basis,” Rashid says. As in orthodox Islam, the sect prohibited drinking alcoholic beverages and the eating of pork.

“Muslims also paid great attention to courtesy and showed respect to one another and to women,” he says.

Rashid was drawn to the Nation of Islam, he says, partly by what he called his search for religious values, one reason he liked the changes introduced in 1975.

“We had been a separatist group that focused on the so-called Negro. The black man had been disenfranchised from society by police brutality and Jim Crowism. Elijah Muhammad talked more about the Bible” because, he said, Christianity was often used to justify racism.

Rashid began studying the Koran for the first time, explaining, “We had no real reason to read it before.

“The majority of (Nation of Islam followers) made the transition into a universalist religion,” he adds. The movement led by W. D. Mohammed went through decentralization and several name changes, then decided to forgo any name. A rival group led by Louis Farrakhan retained the name Nation of Islam.

Rashid believes that Islam still has an appeal among African Americans, but now the emphasis is on the egalitarian, multiracial nature of the religion.

“The Prophet Mohammed with his message dispelled the idea of the superiority of one race over another,” he says.

The big issues always intrigued Nancy Lydick. She talks about being 5 years old and lying on the pavement in front of her house in central Texas one warm night, studying the vast cosmic billows of the Milky Way.

“I remember looking up at the stars and wondering, ‘What’s behind all of this?’ ” says Lydick, whose voice still carries traces of the Texas plains.

As an adult, the quest for answers led Lydick through several denominations of Christianity, a brief stint in Judaism and finally to Islam. She has been a confirmed Muslim since 1982, when she declared, as required by the Koran, her belief that there is only one God and that Mohammed was his last prophet.

A tall, slender woman with penetrating brown eyes, Lydick lives in the San Fernando Valley and is active in the Islamic Center of Southern California. She is the host of a weekly television show about Islam--using her Arabic name Nasiha Sakina (“tranquil adviser”).

It was fundamental doubt about other religions that brought this former junior high school cheerleader, high school drill team captain and graduate of Texas Christian University to Islam.

Such issues as the apparent irreconcilability of science and Christianity or the true definition of the Christian Trinity are of more than academic interest to her. They go to the ultimate meaning of life, Lydick suggests.

Given a translation of the Koran eight years ago by a friend, she consumed it eagerly. “I read it from beginning to end, like a novel,” she says. “It pulled it all together--everything that I had struggled with my whole life.”

Where Christianity had answered her questions with a kind of take-it-or-leave-it mysticism, she says, Islam seemed to offer clarity. Where Judaism appeared to advocate a kind of ethnic exclusivity--”You really had to be born into it,” she says--Islam was polyglot and accessible.

Following the path of her faith has been punishing at times, Lydick says. It has led to divorce, alienation from some family members and an attempt by a Christian minister to “deprogram” her then-teen-age son Todd (now 23 and named Tariq).

Lydick, a psychotherapist in a Long Beach mental health program and the head of the psychology and human behavior department for the Los Angeles branch of San Diego-based National University, continues to encounter a lot of misunderstandings about her religion. Uninformed people often expect her to cover her face and to participate in a polygamous marriage, she says.

“The Koran doesn’t dictate fashion,” says Lydick, who was dressed recently in a two-tone plaid jacket and skirt and a head scarf. “It dictates modesty.”

She insists that there is nothing inherently oppressive toward women about her religion. Muslim men who treat women with disrespect, she says, are doing so because of cultural proclivities rather than because of any dictates of the Koran, which urges husbands to treat their wives with kindness.

She submits to all of the rigors of the religion, praying five times a day, abstaining from drinking alcohol and eating pork, fasting during Ramadan. “I lead a very boring life,” she says, laughing.

Despite the stereotypes, Islam has a lot to offer to Americans, Lydick insists, especially the “spiritual part.” There’s a healing quality to the religion, which she recognizes as a therapist, she says.

A round-the-clock relationship with God lifts Muslims above despair, she says: “When you pray five times a day, it’s very difficult to forget God.”

Amid the clatter of heavy porcelain plates and the steamy smell of northern Chinese beef noodles, Chen Mei-hua scanned the roomful of customers as she glided between tables in the restaurant she owns in Rowland Heights.

By most outward signs, Chen’s modest restaurant in this San Gabriel Valley city appears no different from the hundreds of northern-China style eateries in Southern California.

But as Chen, 35, passed the table of an Indian customer, she said: “Salaam aleikum” (“Peace to you”), the traditional Arabic greeting. “Aleikum salaam,” the man replied.

In Chen’s life, there are few traces of the Middle Eastern customs and traditions that have come to dominate most American perceptions of Islam. Rather, she is quintessentially Chinese in her habits and customs.

“Even my customers are sometimes surprised to find that I’m a Muslim,” she says.

Except for basic prayers, she cannot speak Arabic. When she reads the Koran, she pronounces the name of God not as Allah, but Anla . His prophet’s name is pronounced not as Mohammed, but as Mu han mo de .

She does not cover her head in public with the hijab , as is common in many parts of the Middle East, and she chooses to work, running the China Muslim Restaurant.

Chen said that after growing up in a small Chinese Muslim community in Taiwan, she was struck by the diversity of cultures in American mosques, where Middle Easterners and Europeans pray next to Chinese, Indonesian and Indian Muslims.

Even among the Chinese, there is no monolithic sense of what it means to be a Muslim, she says. Her sister, Jamillah, married a Libyan Muslim. “She has more of a Middle Eastern influence, and I am more influenced by Chinese culture,” Chen adds.

Before the outbreak of war in the Persian Gulf, Chen says, she sympathized with her fellow Muslims in Iraq, but now “we would feel bad if America was defeated. If I still lived in Taiwan, maybe I would want Iraq to win because they are Muslims.”

She is frightened that her tiny restaurant may become a target for vandals.

Chen’s daily ritual of prayer is the same as practiced throughout the Islamic world. The Arabic words she repeats were handed down to her by her father, just as they were passed to him decades ago.

Chen’s family has been Muslim for as far back as she can trace. “My father is Muslim, as was his grandfather, his great-grandfather and even before that,” she says.

She came to the United States with her husband in 1985 from Taiwan, following her father, who immigrated several years earlier to work as a cook in a Chinese restaurant. “America has been very good to us,” she says.

But she added that the opportunities and diversity of American society also weigh upon her mind as she ponders her family’s future.

“Sometimes I worry a little,” Chen says. “My only fear is that my children will lose their belief.”

This story was reported and written by Times Staff Writers John Dart in Los Angeles, Ashley Dunn in Los Angeles, Elizabeth Mehren in Boston, Edmund Newton in the San Gabriel Valley and David Treadwell in Columbia, Conn.

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