01:00 AM EDT on Wednesday, May 19, 2004
BY JENNIFER LEVITZ
Journal Staff Writer


This is not America. This is not how they are. I live with Americans. I blame whoever was in charge. FADEL ABU-HILAL Lincoln bakery worker, on the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal

At Masjid Al-Islam, a gold-domed mosque in North Smithfield, there are rules intended to keep minds on Allah. Once inside the sanctuary, worshipers must refrain from discussing politics.

That is fine with Nasreen Ahmed, who arrives for Friday's prayer service draped in a dupatta, a long scarf, of fine cotton. Since the war in Iraq began, Ahmed has not wished to discuss politics in any setting.

Eight years ago, Ahmed, who is 50, moved from Pakistan to the thriving Muslim community in Pawtucket, where she and her husband own a gas station. She has found it depressing to talk about Iraq with her Arab friends and divisive to talk about Iraq with her American friends.

But the unfolding scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison is changing her conversations.

When she talks about that with her American friends, she feels united with them -- united in abhorrence.

The news of the prison scandal and the beheading of a young American entrepreneur is so outrageous that it's strengthening the relationships between some Arabs and Americans.

There will always, of course, be the irrational fringe. Like whoever made the crank call to the Islamic Center of Rhode Island last week after the release of the video in which a hooded man cut off the head of 26-year-old Nick Berg and then urged Muslims to rise up against Americans.

But, said Brown University Prof. William O. Beeman, "thinking people" are stepping back and saying this is crazy, "this behavior doesn't represent any group of people anywhere."

Beeman, professor of anthropology and director of Middle East studies at Brown, said, "There's a kind of transcultural empathy that pervades all human populations. We really can understand what people are going through on a human level. No one likes to have their group tarred with the bad actions of a few people."

At the mosque in North Smithfield, the largest of some six mosques in Rhode Island, Nasreen Ahmed desribes how she saw an American friend at the supermarket just after the pictures of U.S. soldiers mistreating Iraqi prisoners were made public.

Ahmed says her friend cried, right there in the market. "She said, 'I'm so sorry,' " Ahmed says. Shd told her friend, "It's not your fault. I'm very sorry, too. I'm sorry things are getting so bad."

"There have been others," she says, meaning conversations with Americans, like the one in the grocery store.

"I see tears in their eyes. My God, it's not only us that feels bad."

And both cultures have plenty to feel bad about. The beheading video resembled a kind of ritual killing done for show, and the killers claimed to be doing it in the name of Islam.

U.S. officials have described the prison photos as bestial. Muslims have cringed at such a blatant violation of Islamic culture.

To a Muslim's eyes, the photos are particularly degrading. Male Iraqi detainees are shown naked, and simulating sex acts with other men -- as smiling American military police officers, including women, stand nearby. In Islamic culture, to be nude in public is considered a horrific sin, as is homosexuality, so much so, that even a man forced into such acts would be shamed by his society. Beeman, the Brown anthropology professor, believes the photos were taken because if the prisoners knew such pictures were floating around, they might talk.

ON A WARM DAY last week, Abdelhak Filali is cutting dough in the kitchen at Ronzio Pizza, in a strip mall in Cumberland. Flour cakes his fingers and his Levi's.

He talks about the prison abuse, which he hears about all day from the TV mounted on the wall.

"To be naked, that's an insult to our culture and our principles. To have a man with ladies' underwear on him, it's shocking. It's an insult," he says.

Filali is from Morocco, a country in North Africa on the Mediterranean Sea. He graduates this month from Johnson & Wales University and will return to Morocco, with his "American MBA." He was always told that a degree from the United States would open doors for him back home.

He brings up the video of the beheading of Nick Berg, who was his age, 26.

"His parents," Filali says, "those poor people."

He says that "if you're human, you have to feel bad."

At Ronzio Pizza, Abdelhak Filali says that lately his customers want to know what he thinks about the news from Iraq. He'll just shake his head and -- they'll shake their heads, too.

Similar transcultural empathy is playing out in a different strip mall, this one in Lincoln, past the woods and a silo bedecked with an American flag.

It is late morning, last Friday, and an elderly woman leaves Bread & More Bakery and gets into a sedan with an American flag hood ornament.

The front door of the bakery is open, to let in the May breeze. Inside, the bakery is fragrant with coffee and warm cakes. The owner, Saleh Ead, who is 39 and Palestinian, gets in at 4:30 a.m. He proudly leads the way around his sunny store.

Graduation cakes are on display. On a wooden shelf are pictures of the two teams he sponsors: Little League and Lincoln Youth Soccer.

He has taped a newspaper clip about Lincoln's Teacher of the Year on the pastry counter. The teacher is his "everyday customer," he says.

There are subtle signs that this is a Muslim-owned store. Scripture in Arabic hangs over the kitchen door. When he prays, Ead puts up a "be back in five minutes" sign and goes into the kitchen to face Mecca, Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of the Arab prophet Muhammad.

Lately, the conversations are a tip-off that this bakery is a place where Muslim and American cultures intersect.

Fadel Abu-Hilal, a bakery worker, describes those conversations on a break. He has a goatee, dimples, and a cell phone hooked to his belt. He is 25, and from Jordan. He is in Rhode Island to attend Johnson & Wales. He recalls how one of his professors apologized to him a few days after the prison abuse photos came out. Then, a regular customer came into the bakery and said he was sorry.

"He felt bad. He said it felt humiliating," Abu-Hilal says. He told his customer, "Listen, Jimmy, I know how you're feeling."

Abu-Hilal says he is empathetic to how American citizens might feel -- misjudged -- because he felt misjudged after Sept. 11.

Shortly after the terrorist attacks, for instance, he was doing an internship at the front desk of a hotel in Boston. He says that a customer asked him if he was Arab -- and when he said yes, laughed and told him not to put a bomb in her room.

Now, it is American officials who are telling the world not to judge the United States and democracy from the pictures out of Abu Ghraib.

"I'm not going to do what Americans did after 9-11, no offense," says Abu-Hilal. "I'm not going to blame this country."

"This is not America," he says of the prison scandal. "This is not how they are. I live with Americans. I blame whoever was in charge."

Though Abu-Hilal talks warmly about his American friends, he says he does not trust the U.S. government. In fact, he represents the challenge the United States has in restoring the nation's credibility with Arab nations.

Abu-Hilal condemns the beheading of Nick Berg, who was killed in what his captors said was revenge for the prison abuse. Yet, he was not surprised that terrorists lashed out.

"I'm not telling you it was the right way, but what do you expect? I'm not saying it was right."

Abu-Hilal says of the U.S. government: "After what you see from those pictures of prisoners, how would you trust them?"

Bakery owner Saleh Ead finishes his thought: "The trust is broken."

This worries Ead, who with his wife, Jennifer Ead, is a permanent resident of the United States and is raising his children in North Providence. He worries about how they will view America -- and how they and their generation of Americans will be judged by the world in years to come.

It's near 1 p.m., and Ead and Abu-Hilal say they must leave to attend prayers at their mosque. Friday is the day Muslims congregate in prayer, as Saturday is for Jews, and Sunday for Christians. Ead says: "Hearts can heal in time; I hope people will believe this [Iraq] mission will liberate the people."

VIRGINIA TILLEY, associate professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, in Geneva, N.Y., believes that ordinary Americans and their elected officials now have the chance to help restore the credibility of the United States.

Arabs and the rest of the world are hearing Americans say, "We didn't know; we're appalled. We're not satisfied with this explanation," she said. "That's the best possible message to send the world. It tells the world that Americans do mean well and that when Americans find out [the treatment of Iraqis] isn't what they thought it was, they stand up and shout and change it."

In fact, this reaction is giving faith in the United States to Mohammad Arif.

He has just finished Friday's prayer at the Majid Al-Islam mosque. The afternoon sun catches the golden dome and minaret. Women, their heads covered, are leaving the mosque through the women's entrance. Muhammad Arif has just come out of the men's door.

A cardiologist, Arif helped build this mosque for the growing Muslim community in northern Rhode Island. He donated land and money.

Arif says he moved to the United States from Pakistan as a young man, "for my freedom and my children's freedom."

He trusts in the U.S. Constitution, which he calls a "great gift to this country," to get to the bottom of the prison scandal.

He says he is encouraged because he sees people "getting back to decency."