Islam and How to Live It: One Faith, Many Beliefs

Friday afternoon prayers at the mosques of Las Vegas tend to draw late-arriving crowds. The ritual call to prayer has been recited, the weekly sermon has been launched, and still the stragglers stream in, kicking off their shoes and scurrying to find a place on the prayer rug.

Nobody seems to take much notice. Nonetheless, Muslim worshipers who show up after the Islamic equivalent of the first pitch do forfeit an opportunity for enhanced reward in the afterlife.

“There is a tradition,” said Zafar A. Anjum, imam at the Jama Masjid mosque on Desert Inn Road, “that on Fridays angels come to the door of the mosque and make records. The one who comes in first, Allah gives him a reward equal to that person who sacrifices the camel, and who gives away the meat of the camel as a charity.”

The second Muslim, Anjum went on, receives the same reward as one who has sacrificed and donated a cow, the third a goat, the fourth a chicken, and so on down the sacrificial food chain. The last to arrive on time for prayers earns a chit for paradise equivalent to that of giving away an egg.

“After that,” he said, “when the speeches start, these angels close their records, the books. Those who come after that, their names are not written. They don’t get any rewards.”

In the course of a year of visits, Las Vegas Muslims would prove to be passionate instructors in the intricacies of Islam. They would weigh in, when asked, on the war, geopolitics and terrorism. What seemed to animate them most, however, were questions that got to the heart of what it meant to be a Muslim.

Their thoughts on the afterlife, on arranged marriages, on traditional Islamic dress, on dream interpretation and beards and angels -- whatever the topic, most did their best to tackle it. The tutorials were given in the entry halls and parking lots of mosques, around dinner tables, in office conference rooms and, late one night last July, from behind the wheel of Muhammad Hayat’s well-worn Mercedes-Benz.

“This is Islam,” Hayat, a clothes salesman originally from Morocco, was saying. “This is the work of the prophet.”

He and another Muslim man were headed to the mosque for final evening prayers after making a call on a widow and her five children. The family, newly arrived from Afghanistan, lived in a small apartment outside the city. The mother spoke little English, and the oldest boy in the room, a 10-year-old who had picked up the language in school, acted as host. He laid out a plastic tea set on the rug and, explaining that there was no tea in the house, offered the visitors tap water.

Are you all still making your daily prayers at home? Hayat asked the boy.

“Some days,” he said.

With her son serving as interpreter, the mother said she had been looking for work at the casino hotels as a maid. In the meantime, her oldest boy, a teenager asleep in the next room, was supporting the family as a roofer -- not the softest of jobs in a Las Vegas summer.

“They don’t know too much about American culture,” Hayat said of the family. He was back in his car and rolling down a slight grade on the Boulder Highway. The lights of the city were spread out below. “But day to day, basically, they survive. All they need is two or three more breadwinners.”

The excursion was part of a weekly effort to reach out to others who had been missing at prayers or who perhaps had fallen into some difficulty. The purpose of the visit, Hayat said, was simply to offer a measure of moral support, “to maybe put a smile on their faces.”

“This, little as it is, makes a difference. This is Islam. Islam is not a matter of worship. You go out of your way for other people the best way you can. How you worship, and what you say when you worship, that is something up to you.”

Outside the car window, lighted billboards flashed by, one after another, hawking $7.99 prime rib, loose slots, looser women. Hayat seemed to notice none of it. He talked rapidly over his shoulder as he drove, teaching:

“A Muslim is somebody who submits his life to the will of Allah in the best way he can. Meaning you try to live your life according to what Allah wants. Of course you are not going to be 100% successful, but at least you try as hard as you can.... Islam is not race. It’s not only for the Arabic-speaking people. No. Islam is the complete religion, the last religion. After this, there is the meeting with Allah.

“And everything in this world, everything in this life” -- he waved a hand across the window -- “is the proof of the existence of the Allah. Nothing here can be created with the human being by chance, like this.” He clicked his fingers, and as he did so, the car happened to pass Sam’s Town, a casino-hotel ablaze with flashing lights.

Does that everything include Sam’s Town? a passenger ventured from the back seat.

The rearview mirror reflected Hayat’s thin smile.

“Well,” he said, “this is another thing.”

*

In their dissertations, many of the Muslims of Las Vegas would begin by pointing out what Islam holds in common with, and where it departs from, other religions. Muslims, they would explain, believe they worship the same God as Christians and Jews, the God of Abraham. They believe in heaven, hell and a day of judgment. They believe Moses and Jesus were prominent prophets whose message over time was distorted or ignored -- leading God to deliver the Koran, the sacred book of Islam, to Muhammad as a final reminder of his will.

From there, the instructors might move on to the five pillars of Islam: the obligation of Muslims to declare their belief that there is no god but God, and that Muhammad was his prophet; to pray daily at five designated times; to fast from dawn to sundown during Ramadan; to make a set amount of charitable donations; and finally, if possible, to make the pilgrimage to Mecca.

If they considered a question too technical, they would recommend a visit to Jama Masjid and the small, tidy office of Imam Anjum. As one of them pointed out: “If you had a heart problem, you go to a cardiologist.... When it’s something in Islam that you don’t understand, you have to go to a scholar. That’s what we do.”

Anjum is a short man with rounded shoulders. Born into a family of Islamic scholars, he had memorized the Koran by the age of 10, as had his father, grandfather, an uncle and many cousins. He earned a doctorate in Islamic studies at a noted Muslim university in India, and for five years served as imam in Palm Beach, Fla. In early 2002, Anjum was recruited to move west and become spiritual director of the Islamic Society of Nevada, based at Jama Masjid, Las Vegas’ largest mosque.

From time to time, he sat in his office and offered short courses on Islam. The instruction began from the ground up: In the first session, he dropped from his chair to demonstrate prayer ritual. One theme that cropped up frequently was confusion among non-Muslims and Muslims over what were Islamic requirements and what were cultural customs.

“Actually,” he said in one session, “Islam is not conservative, and Islam tries to adopt the culture of some country or region as long as it does not contradict with the teachings of Islam. So Muslims, they have different cultures because of their backgrounds. But problems start when people mix up the culture with the Islamic teachings.”

He offered an example.

“Like the beating of women in Afghanistan or in some other Muslim countries: That is the culture of those people, and it was even before Islam. Islam is the religion that corrected the people of that region. But still, most of them, they are ignorant. They are not aware of what is the true teaching of Islam. And they do whatever they saw their forefathers and their ancestors were doing.”

At Friday prayers, Anjum can come across as something of a scold, standing to deliver brusque instruction in proper behavior, reminding the gathered that T-shirts and short pants do not qualify as appropriately modest attire, or that Muslim men are supposed to sit while urinating, or that taxicabs with provocative signs must be parked at a far remove from the mosque.

In his sermons, the latest evidence of broad cultural decline is a frequent theme. One Friday he tore off on a newsmagazine item about nude camps for teenagers: “They said this is natural,” he said, his voice rising. “Yes, this is natural, but it is natural for the animals! Very soon you will see the consequences! What’s happening right now? Allah, he works in mysterious ways.... Three days ago on CNN they were saying that some diseases are transferring to the human beings from the animals. Monkey pox! Mad cow! You want to be an animal, Allah will give you the disease of the animals!”

At the start of nearly every service, Anjum demanded that cellphones and pagers be turned off. And yet, at some point in the proceeding, there would be a chime or bong or a few ringing bars of reveille or “Camptown Races.” And a dozen Muslims would start slapping at their hips, fumbling under their shirts, frantically trying to determine if they were the culprit and, if so, to find the mute button.

One afternoon, Anjum provided some context for his campaign against the cellphone. It came up during a discussion about the Islamic concept of prayer. Christians often say that in prayer they are talking to God; with Muslims, Anjum offered, it is a slightly different arrangement.

“The Muslim concept about the prayer is that once you started the prayer, you should feel that you are watching God, you are seeing God,” he said. “This is what has been told to us by Prophet Muhammad.... When you start praying, you leave all the world and worldly things aside and concentrate on the concept that you are watching or you are seeing God.”

Watching God?

“Watching God. And the prayer is a direct relationship between the human being and God. It connects the person, the servant, with his Lord. The prayer is an ascension, the ascension of the believers. You are connected and you are elevated. During that time, you are not here in this world, you are in some other world.”

And a ringing cellphone can violate that moment?

“Yes, yes. Exactly. At that time, all sounds are very damaging. They can ruin the prayer.”

Anjum looked at his watch. There was time for a final question. The choice seemed obvious. So then, he was asked, when you are praying, what do you see? What does God look like?

He paused, looked away.

“I try my best to visualize, but I cannot share this experience. I cannot mention it with anyone else.”

It’s personal?

“Yes. It’s personal.”

*

Almost from its inception, there have been splits within Islam. Soon after the death of the prophet Muhammad in 632, the Sunni and Shiite factions were forged in a dispute over his successors. In the centuries since, there have been reform movements and countermovements, along with numerous sects and subsects. Differing schools of thought developed over how to interpret and carry out Islamic law.

There are fault lines running beneath the Las Vegas Islamic community as well. The first stereotype to take a tumble in this journalistic exercise was the notion that “they” might think alike. Beyond the core tenets, the five pillars and the rest, the ideas about Islam and how to live it tend to scatter.

Muslims might believe, for instance, that it is silly for them, in a modern American city, to dress like Bedouin nomads, unless they hold the view that the loose-fitting traditional dress offers practical and spiritual advantages.

They might believe Muslim men should wear beards, following the prophet’s example, or they might snarl, as a cleanshaven Muslim did, thumping his heart, “My beard is in my chest.”

They might dismiss as “non-practicing” those Muslims who rarely make it to a mosque -- an overwhelming majority in the case of Las Vegas -- or they might retort that there’s more to being a Muslim than being seen regularly at the mosque.

Ala Ramadan, a helicopter mechanic from Jordan, bristled when it was mentioned that he had been offered as an example of a non-practicing Muslim. A stocky 38-year-old dressed in shorts, uniform work shirt and laced-up boots, Ramadan was seated at a table in a hangar near the airport. A bulge of something that looked suspiciously like chewing tobacco was lodged under his lip.

“If people think I’m not practicing because I don’t go to the mosque, I think they are narrow-minded,” he said, spitting into an empty soda can. “It’s between me and God, I think. It’s between me and God. I mean, a lot of people, I guarantee you, they go to the mosque during the day and they do their thing at night, you know? And I think that’s hypocritical.”

African American Muslims who have come to Islam from other religions sometimes complain they must endure the condescension of immigrants from Muslim countries who grew up in the faith. And yet there are immigrants who prefer to pray at Masjid As-Sabur, Las Vegas’ so-called black mosque, because they are put off by the atmosphere across town at the larger Jama Masjid.

“In this community,” said a young man from the Middle East, “there are a lot of lines drawn, cultural and racial lines, an educational divide, lines between the wealthy doctors from [South Asia] who run everything here and the people who are maybe just getting by -- cabdrivers, construction workers, whatever.”

He was standing outside Jama Masjid, speaking almost in a whisper.

“That’s why a lot of us go to Sabur for prayers when we can. At Sabur they give you a real Muslim greeting, a real Muslim hug.”

There also are tensions common to all immigrants: how to balance the cultures and customs of the old country and the new, what to leave out, what to let in. All the familiar battlegrounds between teenagers and parents can come into play -- language, music, wardrobe, romance.

There are Muslim teenagers in Las Vegas who recoil at the idea of arranged marriage, a common practice in some parts of the Islamic world, while others accept that there might be wisdom in a matchmaking system that does not rely on seduction and romance. Some parents navigate a middle course, promoting what they call “arranged introductions.”

“Sometimes our parents and grandparents tend to feel that we are losing our traditions and our cultures,” said 19-year-old Musta Aman, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas premed student from Eritrea. “Like, my parents will say, you know, ‘You are too Americanized now,’ like you are losing your roots or something like that. You’re changing.”

Perhaps the most transparent source of friction and debate among the Muslims of Las Vegas falls under the general heading of gender politics. Should women wear head scarves? Should they shake hands with men? Should they keep to themselves at mosque functions? Should they work or stay at home?

Questions such as these produce an irresolvable tangle of opinion, and frequently more than a bit of defensiveness. Muslim men will point out that patriarchal societies are not exclusive to Islamic lands. Didn’t it take the United States more than a century, they will demand, to give women the vote?

In turn, there are Muslim women who insist that Islam’s dictates about modest dress and pious behavior are not oppressive but protective.

Those concerned with the exploitation of women, they suggest, might train their attention not on covered women praying in the back of the mosque but on the decidedly uncovered women gyrating in the Las Vegas gentlemen’s clubs or running cocktails to the blackjack tables.

Others complain privately of Muslim men who, disdainful of hearing a female viewpoint, behave at meetings as though the women are not in the room. At mosque events, the men and women sit on opposite sides of the hall. Some women -- and men too -- find this absurd, but they do it.

At a social function one night, a long line of men and women was working its way toward the buffet table.

“There should be two lines,” an older Muslim man said to his wife as they joined the queue. He spoke with an Arabic accent. She appeared to be American-born.

“There’s only one table,” the woman said, “and the line is moving along fine.”

“No, I mean there should be different lines for the women and men.”

She shrugged.

“Men and women,” the man said, his voice growing louder, “should not be in the same line. Move to the other side.”

She slapped down her empty paper plate and marched out of the room.

*

Through much of last year, a major construction effort was underway at Jama Masjid. Its primary purpose was to create a second-story loft in which women could pray. Previously, women had been placed in three rows at the rear of the prayer room, separated from the men by a white plastic chain.

“This will be very nice,” Cadry Genena, a Muslim businessman in charge of the project, said late last summer as the work neared completion. “We will have this upstairs just for the women.”

Originally from Egypt, Genena has lived and worked in the United States for more than 30 years, as a banker, developer and now as owner of a care facility for the elderly. At one point he had considered investing in gas stations, but he abandoned the idea because to succeed in Las Vegas, gas stations must offer their customers more than regular and premium. They also must provide slot machines.

“I would not do that,” he said, “because it is not consistent with my beliefs.”

Genena explained the separation of women and men during prayer as a practical matter:

“You know in Islam the women stand behind the men. A lot of people don’t know why, and they say Muslims just push the women to the back because they are second-class citizens. But the whole idea is that, when everybody is bending down in prayer, I don’t necessarily want some guy looking at my wife’s behind.

“It’s really a protection for the women.”

A few days later, from behind the desk in her private office, a Muslim woman in professional attire had a retort: “That is such a hypocritical thing to say.... When a man bends over I can look at his ass, and let me say, I can tell you if it’s a very good-looking one or not.

“What is the difference in someone looking at your rear end and you looking at someone else’s rear end? What is the difference? That’s number one. Secondly, you’re supposed to be in the mosque thinking of God only. What are you doing looking at a woman’s ass?”

Her name is Diba Hadi. A native of Afghanistan, she has lived more than half her 39 years in Las Vegas, where she administers a private, nonprofit child-care program.

She doesn’t make it to the mosque often, and has trouble keeping her hijab straight on her head when she does, but she considers herself a Muslim nonetheless.

“I was born and raised as a Muslim,” she said, “but not as an idiot.”

Interviews with the Muslims of Las Vegas never proceeded too far before the interviewee would make a gesture of hospitality, offering a cup of tea, maybe, or a piece of fruit or candy. Hadi maintained the custom.

“Would you like a cocktail, a glass of vodka maybe?”

It was barely lunchtime. She smiled in a way that made clear two things: She had been joking, and she enjoyed watching a startled expression flash across her interviewer’s face.

“Oh, did they tell you Muslims don’t drink?” she went on, playfully. “Did they tell you we don’t have any gays? We don’t have lesbians? We don’t have AIDS? We don’t have prostitution? What are the others? Oh yes, we don’t drink alcohol and we don’t gamble. OK? Very much in denial. It would be nice to have you interview a gay Afghan Muslim.”

Who deals blackjack?

“Oh, you really are particular now, aren’t you?”

Her father had owned a nightclub in Kabul. Their family left the country after the Soviet Union invaded, long before the Taliban took control and invoked its rigid concepts of how Muslims should behave.

“I can guarantee you that I could not live in the Middle East,” she said. “I would have been hand-slapped or shot to death, whatever, because things have changed. People take religion and twist it into their own liking or whatever.”

Hadi had a Sept. 11 story. Within a few days of the terrorist attacks, an FBI agent called and requested an interview. She took the message and turned to her husband, a casino floor manager named Abdul:

“ ‘Abdul, did you do anything illegal?’

“ ‘No,’ he said, ‘did you?’

“So we called him,” she said, “and when he came to our house he was shocked. We had come from our jobs, and I probably had on a tank top and shorts, and he was a little -- not a little -- he was very shocked to see me like that. He was staring at me. And I was staring back at him. And I said, ‘Why are you staring at me?’

“He’s, like, you are too vocal, number one, for a Muslim woman. Secondly, you are not dressed properly. I said, all right. That’s good to know. I didn’t know we had to dress a certain way. But that’s, of course, what you see in the media and how it is portrayed, but he was a little shocked.”

The agent, she said, was running down a tip that men who looked like the Sept. 11 terrorists, some of whom were known to have met in Las Vegas before the hijackings, had been spotted once at her house. Hadi suspected a neighbor must have seen some of her relatives or friends from the old country.

“But don’t you know,” she said, “all Middle Easterners look the same? For God’s sake, they all have mustaches. I thought he was joking when he first mentioned it. I said, ‘No, no, so tell me, really, why you are here?’ He was like, ‘I am serious.’ ”

Also on her mind this day was a more recent dust-up with the Afghan Embassy in Washington. She had called to clear up a bit of paperwork involving the estate of her father, who had died in Las Vegas a few years earlier. She had been instructed by an embassy official to forward pictures of three witnesses who had attended her father’s funeral. She took photos of her grandmother, her uncle and a male cousin and sent them along.

Now this same functionary was saying she needed a photograph of one more witness.

Why? she asked.

The picture of her grandmother was a problem. To begin with, the man explained, she wasn’t wearing a veil. Also, he told Hadi, as witnesses “women are not counted as one.” It would take pictures of two women to constitute a single witness.

“That did it,” Hadi recalled. “I said, ‘Do you know that is so illegal.... Are you telling me that you have more brains than I do? On the contrary, I think I have more brains than you.’ I went off on that man. I was screaming to the extent that I got a sore throat. Can you believe it? Think how sad it is. No wonder they’re so screwed up over there.

“I am from Afghanistan and I have never been treated like that.

“I have never been treated as half.”

The interview with Hadi ended a short while later with a question: Was she a Muslim woman who shook hands with men? Experience had demonstrated that some women were willing to and some weren’t, and there was always an awkward moment trying to discern what would seem more rude -- offering a hand or not.

“No,” Hadi responded, opening her arms. “I give hugs.”

*

As it happened, the primer by the scholar Anjum on the rewards bestowed on those arriving on time for prayers came just hours after Hadi told her story. The sun was down, but not the desert heat.

Anjum was seated on the floor of the mosque prayer room, an enormous, aged book of Islamic scholarship opened before him.

He was teaching a weekly course in fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence. The class this night consisted of a single student, an elfin man with thick, horn-rimmed glasses and a wool watch cap pulled down low over his ears.

His name was Nazeer Ahmed. He declined to give his age -- “I’m old enough” -- but looked to be somewhere close to 60. Ahmed holds a doctorate in civil engineering and was the author of a college textbook on hydrology. Since coming to America from Pakistan as a young man, he said, he had taught at universities across the country.

In his appearance and in the passionate yet playful way he spoke, Ahmed recalled the late physicist Richard Feynman, and while Anjum listened in silence, the professor embarked on a wide-ranging and instructive soliloquy on life as a Muslim.

“Christians think that we have a religion called Islam. That’s not true. No, Islam is not a religion. It’s a total way of life. You are living a life controlled by the laws of Islam 24 hours a day. So when people eat at home, that is Islam. When people get married, that is Islam. When people get divorced, that is Islam. All these things of life -- when you go for a walk, when you drink water, exchange gifts -- all these things are Islam.”

And so how do you live that life in American society?

“I’m living here in the U.S. and I’m a full-fledged Muslim, and I’m living the life of total Islam. As a Muslim it is my duty to obey all the laws of the U.S. government, of the U.S. country, of the U.S. people. As a Muslim it is my duty to live as happily, as cooperatively, as cordially, as peacefully as possible with the people of the U.S. I should not try to be something separate.”

He spoke at length about the prophets and free will, about Osama bin Laden and Las Vegas and Judgment Day, before turning finally to the place of women in Islam: “Islam does not allow that the women should be degraded. Islam is very protective of the women.... Islam has imposed duties on the father, on the brother, on the husband, on the son, on the cousins, on the neighbors, on strangers, so that a woman should be honored at all times, at all places.”

This seemed an appropriate moment to mention Diba Hadi’s debate with the embassy about the worth of a woman’s testimony. Ahmed had been eloquent and evenhanded in his views, and it seemed unlikely he would agree that the testimony of a woman should be worth only half that of a man.

As the embassy’s position was described, the professor vigorously nodded his head.

“Yes, yes. And the main reason is that the women, biologically, they may forget things, and they do forget things. You can go to any American wife and ask her husband, ‘Does she remember everything?’ He will tell you plainly, no, 98% of the time she forgets things. And God gives great weight to remembrance because evidence has to be truthful evidence. It cannot be conjecture and guesswork or hypothesis. So the two women is for the sake of justice.”

*

The conversation continued on outside, long after Anjum had closed his big book and left the mosque. A wind had blown the sky clear and the stars were giving the Vegas neon some competition. Ahmed locked his eyes on his audience of one and tried to make one simple, final and overarching point:

“People should be very open, very helpful, very friendly, very cooperative, very cordial -- so that the good comes out. If I am not good to you, the good inside of you will never come out. It will stay contained inside. And I want to see the good in Peter, the good in every Peter in the world. Because there is so much good in every human being, and that good makes you good. I think about this all the time. Good night.”

He pulled down his wool cap and walked away.

It had been quite a day, a ricochet ride over the plains of gender politics, back and forth across the borderlands between protection and oppression, with side visits to the questions of who might be peeking at who’s rear end during prayers, and how many female witnesses it takes to equal the testimony of a single male.

The next morning, the Las Vegas Review-Journal carried a sort of bizarre coda to it all. The top story in its Nevada section told of a new enterprise in Sin City: “Hunting for Bambi.” For $10,000, men purportedly could go into the desert with paintball guns and stalk women recruited from the “adult entertainment industry.” These Bambis, though, certainly weren’t required to wear hijabs. In fact, they wore nothing at all.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Faithful variations

Christians, Jews and Muslims make up the largest U.S. religious groups. Common traits include their belief in one God, group worship and an emphasis on ethical conduct. Followers of all three also believe they have descended from Abraham, specifically from his son Ishmael for Muslims and from his son Isaac for Jews.

Core beliefs

Christianity: Faith in Jesus Christ leads to salvation and eternal life. People are born with original sin. Christ, God and the Holy Spirit form the divine Trinity.

Islam: Entry to paradise is gained through faith in God (Allah); helping the poor and supporting one’s mosque; prayer; fasting; and making a pilgrimage to Mecca. Islam means ‘surrender to the will of Allah.’

Judaism: There is only one God. The world rests on service to God, deeds of love and living consistently with God’s commandments.

Sources of faith

Christianity: Old and New Testaments of the Bible

Islam: The Koran and Sunna

Judaism: The Torah and other Hebrew scriptures, Mishna (oral laws) and Talmud (rabbinical commentaries)

Final judgment

Christianity: When Jesus Christ returns

Islam: After Jesus returns

Judaism: When the messiah arrives

Most important human figure

Christianity: Jesus Christ

Islam: The prophet Muhammad

Judaism: Moses

View of Jesus

Christianity: Divine savior

Islam: One of the most important prophets

Judaism: Not a divinity; otherwise mixed views

Belief in heaven and hell

Christianity: Through salvation and repentance of sin, people who believe in Christ go to heaven. Unrepentant sinners go to hell. Christians disagree on whether nonbelievers go to hell.

Islam: Good deeds lead to heaven; bad deeds are punished in hell. How high a place in heaven the faithful attain depends on how well they follow their faith.

Judaism: The afterlife is not discussed in the Torah and Mishna. Many Jews believe in an afterlife; others don’t.

Sources: Infoplease.com; ‘Jewish Literacy’ by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin; the Omar Ibn Al Khattab Foundation. Researched by Times graphics reporter Cheryl Brownstein-Santiago

*

About This Series

In an effort to depict the lives of American Muslims in an extraordinary time, staff writer Peter H. King and staff photographer Genaro Molina spent a year among the Islamic community of one U.S. city -- Las Vegas. From April 2003 to April 2004, they periodically visited the city’s mosques and the homes, workplaces and social events of the diverse Muslim population.

SUNDAY: Living in Las Vegas. The challenges -- and anticipated rewards -- in trying to stay on the straight path.

TODAY: The faith. What Las Vegas Muslims believe and how they sometimes disagree among themselves.

TUESDAY: After Sept. 11. How the events of that day and subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq altered lives.

WEDNESDAY: The path to Las Vegas. Two Muslims, born a world apart, and their remarkably similar journeys.

THURSDAY: From April to April. The twists life can bring in a single year.