One God and One Nation

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

Ghassan (Gus) Karim's daughter was on the phone. Karim is a tailor who immigrated to the U.S. from Lebanon in 1969. Thirty-two years later, when George W. Bush took the oath of office as President, he was wearing a suit made by his friend Gus. But after last week's bombings, Karim's daughter, who works for a Dallas financial-consulting company, called in tears. She had been taunted. "You were born in this country. Don't worry about it," Karim told her. A Muslim, a Rotarian and an American success story, he says, "This is my home, and I am proud to be here. I will never forget what this country gave me."

Islam may be America's fastest-growing faith. The country's 7 million Muslims are overwhelmingly middle and professional class: a handful of autoworkers, many more small-business owners, lots of doctors and, increasingly, university professors. There are very few poor among them. Since many arrived in the 1960s as students, says Professor John Esposito, head of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, "it's remarkable how fast they are making it up the ladder. And the next generation is expected to do better." They are social conservatives: more than 65% voted for George W. Bush. They are pro-gun control, pro-environment and pro-death penalty. They are proud of their country. And they are viscerally--indeed, theologically--antiterrorist. One of the first clerics to speak at the service at the National Cathedral last week was Imam Muzammil H. Siddiqi: "We see the evil of destruction and the suffering of many of the people before our eyes. With broken and humble hearts and with tears in our eyes we turn to you, O Lord."

Like Judaism and Christianity, its close religious relatives, Islam honors all humanity--not just believers--as created by God, who is referred to as "the compassionate and merciful." The Judeo-Christian respect for the widow and the orphan is amplified by the fact that the Prophet Muhammad was himself an orphan, notes Georgetown's John O. Voll. And for all the conflict depicted in the Koran, its recognition of pluralism is embodied in a verse that explains that God created humans different from one another so that they can learn from one another.

Amid the carnage of the Middle East, some clerics are providing young men with religious rationales for slaughter. But they are the anomaly in the global embrace of the faith. The leaders of Islamic America describe such reasoning as worse than a minority opinion--in fact, a kind of perversion. Sheik Taha Jabir Alalwani, president of the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences, has this to say of the Twin Tower terrorists: "If they claim they are Muslim, I would say they are not."

That opinion rests on the Koran's Chapter 60, Verse 8, which bids Islamic victors to "show [civilians] kindness and deal with them justly." In the Hadiths, or traditions of Muhammad, the Prophet commands, "Neither kill the old...nor children and babes nor the females," and is portrayed as appalled to discover a woman's corpse on a battlefield. Similar protections pertain to farmers and tradesmen. Even the slaughter of enemy soldiers is enjoined if no war has been declared. "It's basically the Geneva Convention," says Jamal Badawi, a well-known Islamic interpreter who teaches at St. Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Badawi compares the acts of Sept. 11 to the murder of abortion providers by a Christian gunman who argues that life is sacred.

Gus Karim is not a theologian, but he is a man of faith. "The Koran says, if a man kills an innocent person, to God it looks like he is killing all innocent people on earth," he says. "If you save an innocent person, it looks to God that you are saving all life on earth." He has urged his fellow Rotarians to raise money for the Red Cross. He prays for last week's victims. And for America. "This is my home and my country," he says. "And I want my country to come back together."

--By David Van Biema. With reporting by Hilary Hylton/Austin

With reporting by Hilary Hylton/Austin