The Man They Kept Sending

A basement on Main Street

IN THE SPRING of 2003, forty Houston police officers came down into the basement of a converted bank on Main Street, and I watched them learn that they had nothing to fear from us.

The building had been a bank once, grand and capacious, the kind of downtown premises put up when a bank wanted passers-by to know it was permanent. Hakeem Olajuwon bought it and turned it into a mosque and an Islamic education centre, and paid for the conversion himself. On this particular Wednesday the retired Rockets centre came down to the basement and told the officers what I had been telling rooms like that one for two years: that most Muslims are peaceable, law-abiding people, that the religion was badly misunderstood, and that he intended to keep spending his money and his fame on saying so.

The Houston Chronicle sent a reporter and a photographer that day. One of the photographs that ran shows a uniformed officer at a table, head down, working through the literature we had laid out — pamphlets, a book with ISLAM across the cover, a framed aerial photograph of the Grand Mosque at Makkah on the wall behind him. He is not posing. He is reading. I have never needed a better picture of what we were trying to do.

The department called it a cultural awareness programme, one of several the Houston Police Academy ran so officers could meet the city's communities. The Chronicle credited the teaching to organisers from the Islamic Circle of North America, which was true, and left it there.

I designed that course. I wrote it, I carried it through its approvals, I managed it and I taught it. I had been a Muslim for six years, I held no theological credential and no academic one, and when I was not doing this I drove a truck.

This is the record of what I did in Houston, and of the people who did it with me.

Before

I came to Houston in the winter of 1997, eleven months a Muslim.

I had said the Shahadah in a masjid on New Year's Eve 1996, at the end of a long private search that had taken me through Roman Catholicism, a Pentecostal church, the Messianic Jewish movement and a Conservative synagogue before it ended in Islam. That story is told elsewhere on this site. What matters here is what it left me with: I had reasoned my own way in from outside, which meant I remembered exactly which questions were the hard ones, because I had asked every one of them myself, and recently.

In 1999 I founded Islamcentral. It was a website, which in 1999 still meant something a person built himself. I made it to explain Islam from the position of someone who had come to it as a stranger, and to bridge between faiths rather than preach across the gap. I was driving long-haul in those years, and I promoted the site from the road, between loads. I found almost immediately that the religion could not be discussed on its own — whatever a conversation started as, the politics of the day arrived within a few exchanges and would not leave.

The name travelled further than I expected. In early 2001 Saudi Aramco World profiled me — a magazine with a serious international circulation, and the first press attention of my life. There was no organisation behind me then. There was a website, a conversion story, and a willingness to answer.

Nothing that follows was planned. It began, as most of it would keep beginning, with somebody else's telephone call.

September 2001

The community began organising before the dust had settled in New York.

There was a news conference after maghrib prayers in the back garden of a well-known community member, and a gathering afterwards that ran into the evening. Everyone in that garden understood what was coming. Some were frightened for their families over something they had no part in and no sympathy for. The question was never whether there would be a backlash. The question was what a community does about one.

Houston's answer was education. Instead of issuing statements and waiting for the weather to change, the city's Muslim leadership decided to explain ourselves in public, at length, to anyone who would listen — and to make ourselves easy to find. Part of that campaign was a billboard on the North Freeway carrying a telephone number anyone could ring with a question about Islam. Keep that billboard in mind. It comes back.

In those same weeks an interfaith alliance formed, an ad hoc body drawing together Christian, Jewish, Sikh, Hindu and Buddhist leaders to stand against terrorism and against the hate crimes that were already happening. They needed someone to face the press, and they asked me. I took it as the honour it plainly was — a convert of not quite five years, speaking for a room of clergy who had a couple of centuries of standing in that city between them.

In October I spoke to an audience at the University of Houston, because the Muslim Students Association asked, and that month somebody put a television camera in front of me for the first time in my life. I did not want to do it. I had never done anything like it, and I was nervous to the point of feeling ill. I did it anyway, because the alternative was that nobody did.

That month set the pattern for the decade. Something needed a person to stand up. I was rarely the obvious candidate. I stood up.

The phone keeps ringing

The billboard number belonged to WhyIslam, ICNA's educational outreach campaign — a toll-free hotline staffed by people who would talk to anyone. The curious rang it. The hostile rang it. The lonely rang it. People who wanted to become Muslim and did not know where to start rang it.

ICNA recruited me and put me in charge of WhyIslam's outreach across Texas, and Houston in particular. And then, for the next two years, my own phone did not stop.

ICNA's Houston chapter asked me to represent it at every public and media event, and I did, through 2001. The Islamic Society of Greater Houston — the largest Islamic organisation in the city, speaking for Houston and everything around it — asked the same, and I carried that through 2001 and 2002. Then ICNA made me one of its three official media representatives for the whole organisation, which meant that when something happened anywhere between Texas and Toronto and a microphone appeared, I might be the one standing in front of it.

One organisation covers a city and its outskirts. The other covers most of a continent. Both of them, at the same time, looked at a five-year convert with a website and a truck and reached the same conclusion: send him.

I had no degree in Islamic studies, no ijazah, no lineage in any institution and no constituency of my own. What I had was an explanation of the faith in plain English, tested against every objection I had once raised myself, and a willingness to sit down in front of the camera and take the question. It turns out that is a rarer combination than it should be.

Behind the titles sat the part that never makes a list like this one: being the person who answers. Television, radio, newspapers and magazines all want someone, usually at short notice, frequently on the worst day of a given week. For years, on behalf of ISGH and ICNA, that someone was me. Somebody has to answer the phone.

The call from the academy

The Houston Police Academy already knew how to do this. It simply had not done it with Muslims yet.

The academy ran an accredited eight-hour elective on hate crimes and hate groups, built in partnership with Holocaust Museum Houston and taught through the lens of the Holocaust by the museum's executive director, Susan Llanes-Myers, the daughter of a Texas Ranger. Her course included a session with a Holocaust survivor and closed with a tour of the museum, and it filled a room of sixty most months.

Officer Steve Smith of the academy's human relations unit believed in that course, and it gave him an idea. The Jewish community had a programme. Muslims in Houston were now being targeted too. Why not the same again?

So he went looking for a way in — and found one on the North Freeway. He rang the number on the billboard.

I have thought about that often since. A police academy that wanted a course, and a campaign whose entire purpose was that somebody would pick up. The two things met because we had made ourselves easy to find, which had been the whole point of the billboard, though none of us had imagined the police calling it.

ICNA's leadership put me forward to develop and manage the programme. I began by going to school on the original. Susan and the museum's organisers welcomed me in, and the officers' anti-hate-crimes class — closed to the public — was opened to me by invitation, so I could sit through it and see how it was done. They were wonderful to work with and unstintingly generous. Our course was built on the Jewish community's shoulders, and they held the ladder while we climbed.

Then I went away and wrote it, over the Christmas holiday, while the rest of the city was doing something else. I remember those weeks well. I was a truck driver building an accredited law-enforcement course at my kitchen table, and I knew exactly how that sentence sounded, and I wrote it anyway.

What I produced had to survive two rooms, either of which could have ended it. On one side, the Houston Police Department and its academy, who would accredit it or not. On the other, Houston's community leaders and religious scholars, who would endorse it or not. The two rooms had almost nothing in common except a veto.

It passed both.

Heidi

I wanted Heidi to present. She was highly educated, she was an excellent speaker, and she wore niqab — the full face veil.

Sheikh Rashad, the scholar at the Da'wah Center, thought that was a mistake, and his reasoning was serious. This was the climate right after 9/11. The veil was the single most alien thing an American police officer could be shown that year, and he was concerned it would frighten the room before Heidi said a word. He had the community's exposure to think about, and he was not wrong that the risk was real.

I thought the risk was the argument. People were being attacked in that city for looking like Heidi. If a room of police officers could not sit in front of a woman in niqab and listen to her, then nothing else we taught them would matter.

So I used her.

It became one of the best decisions of the whole programme. She stood in front of those officers and was plainly one of the sharpest people in the building, and that did more to change what they thought Muslim women were than any pamphlet ever printed. You cannot argue a stereotype out of someone. You can only stand a person in front of it.

The course

We called it Interacting with the American Muslim Community, and by 2002 the approvals were in place to run it at the Islamic Da'wah Center, with Hakeem Olajuwon's blessing over the house he had built.

The pilot drew a room that told me what we had made. Leaders from Houston's Jewish community came. The mayor's office came. The United States Department of Justice came. Afterwards the Houston Police Academy accredited the course as a monthly elective, which meant officers chose it themselves and it counted toward their continuing education. Nobody was ordered into our basement. They signed up.

I was firm from the start that it was not a course about religion. Officers were not there to learn theology. They were there to learn how to read what they were going to meet on a shift.

So we dealt in the practical. Muslims pray five times a day, and the times move through the year. An officer who does not know that sees several people kneeling on small mats beside a car in a car park and reads it as something to approach carefully. An officer who does know it sees people praying, and drives on. If dispatch knows the prayer times, the officers know. We made the same kind of correction about words — the building is a masjid; mosque is a label applied from outside — on the same reasoning, which is that small accuracies compound into a different relationship.

And running under all of it, the point I never moved off: bin Laden and his followers did not represent the faith of the people these officers were policing. They were using us. Saying so, clearly, to rooms of armed public servants, felt like the most useful sentence I owned.

The officers were a pleasure to teach. They came to learn, they were respectful, and they were curious enough to press on what puzzled them. When we described how some of the earliest Muslims had been enslaved people who were freed, one officer wanted to know whether that freedom had extended to women — a fair question, and it got a fair answer: that Muslim women hold considerably more freedom than they are usually shown as having, and that much of what gets read as religious restriction is cultural rather than Qur'anic. A room asking questions like that is a room doing exactly what you built it for.

Hakeem came twice, and spoke publicly in support of the programme both times. His name opened doors that would have stayed shut for a truck driver, and he knew it, and he spent it deliberately. I remain grateful.

And behind everything were the people no article ever mentioned. Someone has to sort the refreshments and keep the projector working, every month, for years. Umar did that. The course ran because he did.

The programme travelled, too. On behalf of the Da'wah Center I delivered diversity training for Harris County Sheriff Precinct 1, on the same principle and to the same end.

The press desk

The course made the news because I made sure it did. I sent a press release out after the pilot, and another when Hakeem agreed to attend, and the cameras came both times.

In April 2003 the Houston Police Officers' Union wrote the programme up in Badge & Gun, its own magazine — an article on hate crimes education that set our course beside the Holocaust Museum programme that had inspired it. The Message International, ICNA's magazine, covered it too. That spring the Houston Chronicle put a reporter and a photographer in the basement for one of Hakeem's visits. The clippings from those months are still in my files, going yellow.

The rest of the decade's media was not about the course. It was about being the person a newsroom rings.

In November 2002, KHOU Channel 11 gave me a segment on Up Close with Dan Lauck — one of the finest television storytellers Texas ever had — on how I became a Muslim. In April 2004 Channel 11 came back and profiled me in a special edition, speaking this time for Houston's Muslim community as a whole, and NPR interviewed me the same month on behalf of ICNA. Channels 2, 13 and 39 all came at various points, for ISGH and for ICNA. On Islamic Perspectives, the cable public-access programme, I appeared as director of WhyIslam-Houston and spent the whole segment on the history of the Torah — because explaining the scripture we share was, to my mind, exactly what Islamic outreach was for.

Underneath the appearances sat the machinery nobody sees: acting as the consultative point of contact for television, radio, newspaper and magazine requests on behalf of ISGH and ICNA. Fielding them, briefing others, taking the ones nobody else wanted. It is not glamorous work. It is the work.

The street

In July 2003 I organised the Justice for All rally outside Congressman John Culberson's office, in support of justice for the Palestinian people — sponsored by WhyIslam and by ICNA above it, with the backing of ISGH.

It turned people out in real numbers, and the numbers were the point. Not because a rally outside a congressional office changes a vote that afternoon, but because a community that had spent two years being talked about needed to discover that it could stand in the open, say something on its own behalf, lawfully, in the ordinary American way — and go home again. People came to that rally who had never been to anything like it in their lives. KPFT interviewed me about it afterwards.

I also represented ICNA on KPFT's September 11th special on Arab Voices, and served as media relations representative for the Third Annual Texas Dawah Conference in 2003 and the Fourth in 2004.

Feeding people

None of what follows generated a headline, and all of it is the reason the rest was worth doing.

I oversaw ICNA's food programme for the homeless in Houston, and its halfway-house programme for former inmates — the kind of work that asks somebody to show up on a schedule, for years, and produces nothing anyone can photograph. I gave presentations in support of ICNA's fundraising events. In 2003 I was one of the central figures in founding the Charles Freeman Center in the Third Ward, for the benefit of Houston's poor.

And when Hurricane Katrina emptied New Orleans into Houston in 2005, our community did what it could for the people arriving with nothing. I went on Arab Voices to talk about it — not for credit, but because Muslims feeding evacuees was a fact worth putting on the record in 2005, when the available story about us was still mostly about something else.

Redford

The best thing I did in Houston had nothing to do with any of the rest of it.

In the early 2000s I came across the situation of the Jumano Apache in Redford, far out in West Texas on the river. Their reservation was losing its people, and the reason was a school. There wasn't one. The government would not permit them a school for their children, and the nearest classroom was eighty miles away. Eighty miles, twice a day, is not a school run. It is a job, and most parents already had one of those.

So families left. And once a family left, their land stood empty, and empty land can be called unoccupied, and unoccupied land can be taken. The whole arrangement worked as a slow squeeze. Nobody had to seize anything at gunpoint. They only had to make staying impossible, and wait.

It had been going on for years. I contacted the congressman covering the area. Nothing came of it.

So we did the obvious thing instead: we went and got them a bus. I put the WhyIslam group onto finding a school bus while we raised the money in the Muslim community — fundraiser after fundraiser, in a community that was not wealthy and was fielding a great deal of hostility of its own just then. They gave anyway. We raised it, we bought the bus, and we delivered it to the tribe. CAIR was kind enough to put out a release about it.

The bus solved nothing. There was still no school. What it did was take the eighty miles off the parents, which meant a family could stay on its land and still get its children educated — and staying was the whole fight. In 2005 I went further and lobbied Congressional leaders on the tribe's behalf.

A bus is a very ordinary object. But it was bought by Muslims in Houston for Apache children in Redford, at a moment when both communities were being told a great deal about what the other was supposed to be. I have never stopped thinking it was the most useful week's work of the lot.

Lecterns

I spoke wherever the Muslim Students Association asked me to. The University of Houston in October 2001, in the weeks when what Muslims were had become the only question in America. Texas A&M in 2002. Stephen F. Austin State University, up in Nacogdoches, in February 2004. And Fort Bend Independent School District that October — an audience of schoolchildren, which is a harder room than any university and a more important one.

Islamfactor

I left Houston in 2006. The following year I built one more thing.

Islamfactor was a website again, as Islamcentral had been, but larger in ambition: an inclusive multifaith forum, designed as a five-year campaign, and it ran the full five years, to 2012. Its purpose ran in two directions at once. Outward, it was for interfaith dialogue — the same work I had always done, on a bigger platform. Inward, it was for countering extremism within the Muslim community itself.

It is comparatively easy to explain your religion to outsiders; they arrive curious, and you are the expert in the room. It is far harder to turn round and address your own — you hold no rank there, and the argument costs you something. I built a platform to do both, and I gave it five years, because I had seen where the community's silences led and I did not want to be part of them.

What it was for

Ten years, more or less, from a news conference in a back garden to a bus in Redford.

In that time I taught police officers in a basement, faced cameras I never wanted to face, spoke for organisations from a city ward to a continent, fed people, raised money, stood outside a congressman's office, and put a woman in niqab in front of forty armed officers because I believed in her and in them. Almost none of it was my idea. Nearly every part of it arrived down a telephone line, usually at an inconvenient hour, asking for someone — and I discovered, call after call, that the someone was going to be me.

I was five years a Muslim when they started sending me. I was never the obvious choice. I had no institution behind me, no credential to wave, and a truck to drive in the morning.

I answered the phone. That turns out to be most of it.

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