Fourteen days after September’s terrorist attack, the FBI paid a visit to the founder and chancellor of East-West University, Dr. Mohammad Wasiullah Khan, a Pakistani-American Muslim.
Days before knocking on the school’s 816 S. Michigan Ave. door, they sent a letter addressed to the university’s Institute of Islam Studies program asking “about any hate crimes against us,” said Khan, who teaches the four classes the Institute offers, and who thankfully had nothing to report. “I appreciated that letter very much,” he said.
During his initial meeting with two FBI agents in September, “they said someone called and tipped them that Osama bin Laden was on our mailing list,” Khan said. “I showed them that he was not.”
Federal agents, he added, returned once again in October and once in November. As of early February, they hadn’t been back.
“The meetings were very friendly, very respectful,” he said. Indeed, Khan referred to the agents as his “colleagues,” because “I’m as much a citizen of this country as anyone else.”
There were, however, some Saudi citizens on the mailing list who needed to be explained. Most notably, Abdullah Omar Nasseef, who 22 years ago while serving as the Secretary General of the Muslim World League, sat on the university’s founding board of advisers. Nasseef, who in 1993 left the League “to work for [King Fahd] as deputy chair of the King’s council,” is still on the school’s mailing list, Khan explained, because he’s still on the board.
Nasseef had clout
The Mecca-based Muslim World League, also called Rabita (an Islamic term meaning, “contact”), was founded in 1962 “by scholars from many Muslim countries at the suggestion of King Faisal,” Khan explained. Because “most Muslims, at least intellectual Muslims, are opposed to absolute monarchies — the Koran says God Almighty is the monarch,” Faisal thought it politically wise “to help organize the more religious aspects” of Islam, he said.
According to arab.net, a respected Saudi-based Arab information Web site: “Rabita is represented in a number of international organizations such as the Organization of Islamic Conferences . . . as well as the United Nations, where it enjoys category A observer status as a non-governmental organization. . . . Rabita is also a member of the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) . . . .”
Former Chicagoan Paul Fisher sat on East-West’s board during the 1980s with Nasseef. “He didn’t have the power of, say, the Pope,” said Fisher, Chairman of the Nevada-based Fisher Space Pen Company, “but he was one of the highest officials in the Muslim world.”
Apparently so. It was Nasseef’s clout that produced three Saudi Princes willing to donate $800,000 combined to found Khan’s school. The last gift, $300,000 “from a Saudi businessman, a billionaire named Ahmed Alireza, paid for the library,” explained Khan.
Born in Pakistan, reared a Muslim, and educated in Indiana (with a PhD in Education Administration from Indiana University), Khan founded East-West as a “non-denominational and non-ethnic university — one that belongs to all humans,” he said.
His altruistic mission, as the school’s name suggests, was to help bridge the gap between East and West. “The East is Africa and Asia; the West is the rest of the world,” he said, pointing to his school’s logo — a torch separating these two worlds. “How can they be joined?” he asked rhetorically. “By the torch of knowledge.”
Yet, there was a more personal reason as well behind the school’s founding, he admitted: “I needed a job.” The small, private black college on West Madison Street for which Khan served as Academic Dean, David Hale Williams University, went bankrupt in 1978, he said. “They owed me about $10,000.”
Open admissions
Khan and a handful of other stiffed DHWU faculty put together $50,000 in seed money to start a new inner-city college. As such, it was designed to serve the most disadvantaged of students through an open admissions policy, and by helping them obtain financial aid. The university’s first graduating class of 1983 had nine members; its last in June 2001 had 75.
Of the school’s eight degree-granting programs, computer science and business administration rank one and two in popularity. Full- and part-time university-wide enrollment now exceeds 1,000 students for the first time. The majority, 68 percent, are African-American.
While Saudi oil money may have gotten Khan’s East-West University started, today “we’re a tuition driven school,” he said. That excludes, however, the Institute of Islamic Studies program, which is free. In fact, students are basically paid to attend. Those who complete the program’s coursework receive a $2,610 tuition credit, explained Zafar Abbas Malik, the university’s Director of Publications.
During the Fall 2001 term, Islamic studies drew 72 students, 25 of whom Khan estimated were Muslim.
(While there is no official census data regarding the number of Muslims that reside in the six-county Chicagoland area, Khan organized an extensive demographic survey in 1994-1995, which put the estimated Muslim population at 285,126. Statewide, the study found 320,744. The largest ethnic Muslim groups represented in the Chicago-area were African-American, 46 percent; Arab, 20 percent; and South Asian, 19 percent.)
Lashing out
During a recent visit to Khan’s Islamic studies class, students were asked to explain the terrorists who claimed Islam as their guide, with the single question: “Why do they hate us so much?”
The chorus-like response: “Islam teaches peace.”
“These people were not acting out of faith,” offered one student. Like Christians who kill abortion clinic doctors are not acting out of faith, he went on to explain.
Later, when asked for his own take on the September attacks, Khan said simply, “All suicide is wrong. You go to hell if you commit suicide. What they did is not Islam.”
If not Islam, the question remains: Why do they hate us so much? The answer, for Malik at least, seems to be part political, part economic.
“It’s the haves vs. the have nots,” said Malik, a Pakistan-born, 30-plus year British citizen who came to East-West three years ago from a London-based, Islamic publishing house. “We have too much, they have too little.”
Characters like bin Laden, and the pilots who actually carried out the attacks, are part of “the Patty Hearst syndrome,” he maintained. “They are all educated with money.”
“Still, I have not found in my own mind, what drove them,” he added. “For my own peace of mind, the best I’ve come up with is to regard them as the wretched of the earth–feeling no hope in their life. It’s a lashing out.”
“My main concern today is, will our leadership be wise enough not to build up future resentments? Is our response to this tragedy going to create 20 bin Ladens 20 years down the road?” he asked.
Malik’s own assessment of the situation seemed hopeful. “Powerful people can be just. I don’t think weak people can be,” he said. “America can be just.”
He does not, however, see much hope in what some critics perceive as the U.S. media’s craven approach to our government’s war efforts, he explained. The level of triumphalism and belligerence evidenced in the media immediately after the attacks, Malik found especially “frightening,” he said.
On Sept. 12, there was a Fox News cable correspondent who asked, “Why is there still an Afghanistan?” relayed Malik. “He would have wiped them out if he could. . . . It’s the same thing, the same energy, the same urge to destroy your enemy” as the terrorists employed against us.
“There needs to be a much more profound analysis than we’re getting from the American media,” said Malik, who like many others has turned to on-line European news outlets, such as the BBC and the Guardian, to get less biased, or at least, differently biased coverage on America’s latest war.
Seeking solace
American television news “is not giving me anything that gives me solace,” he said. “They can wave the flag all day, but they give you nothing you can rest your head on at night; nothing to help you rest and consider how we can avoid this in the future.”
The problem, said Malik, is a “lack of dissent.” A view shared by Joan Konner, a professor and dean emerita at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, who recently wrote in Newsday, “It appears the news media, no less than the politicians, have been swayed by the Bush ultimatum `either you’re with us or for terrorism.'”
