Muslim life in Killeen, Texas one year after Fort Hood shooting

Muslim life in Killeen, Texas one year after Fort Hood shooting
Editor's Note: By CNN's Robert Howell in Killeen, Texas. In March, CNN's Soledad O'Brien will be premiering a documentary about being Muslim in America, looking at the controversy over the building of a mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

When Wagdi Mabrouk heard the news about the shootings on Ft. Hood he remembers thinking how close he was to the alleged shooter.

"Nidal Hassan, I knew him very well. I prayed right beside him."

Mabrouk, a retired command Sergeant Major was overseas for work on Nov. 5, 2009 when Major Nidal Hassan allegedly opened fire on this base of over 50,000 soldiers. Though so far away, the news hit very close to home.

"It happened right outside our backdoor, it was unbelievable, it was just unbelievable. It just took us by surprise," Mabrouk said.

Mabrouk leads prayers at the Killeen mosque

Hoping to help heal the emotional and spiritual wounds that still remain from the tragic events of last year, Mabrouk now serves as a Distinctive Faith Group Leader on Ft. Hood, leading Friday prayers at the interfaith chapel on post.

"We have practiced this peaceful religion for over 1400 years and nothing in the past, since the beginning of Islam, would give us any idea that this is the right thing to do for whatever reason," he said.
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Muslim life in Killeen

After Fort Hood, Muslim American soldier battles on friendly ground

After the Fort Hood shootings, a Muslim American soldier battles on friendly ground

By William Wan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 24, 2010

At 2 o'clock on a Monday morning, the sound of angry pounding sent Army Spec. Zachari Klawonn bolting out of bed.


THUD. THUD. THUD.

Someone was mule-kicking the door of his barracks room, leaving marks that weeks later -- long after Army investigators had come and gone -- would still be visible.

By the time Klawonn reached the door, the pounding had stopped. All that was left was a note, twice folded and wedged into the doorframe.

"F--- YOU RAGHEAD BURN IN HELL" read the words scrawled in black marker.

The slur itself was nothing new. Klawonn, 20, the son of an American father and a Moroccan mother, had been called worse in the military. But the fact that someone had tracked him down in the dead of night to deliver this specific message sent a chill through his body.

Before he enlisted, the recruiters in his home town of Bradenton, Fla., had told him that the Army desperately needed Muslim soldiers like him to help win the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yet ever since, he had been filing complaint after complaint with his commanders. After he was ordered not to fast and pray. After his Koran was torn up. After other soldiers jeered and threw water bottles at him. After his platoon sergeant warned him to hide his faith to avoid getting a "beating" by fellow troops. But nothing changed.

Then came the November shootings at Fort Hood and the arrest of a Muslim soldier he'd never met: Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, who is charged with killing 13 people and injuring more than 30 in a massacre that stunned the nation. And with it, things only got worse.
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Muslim American soldier battles on friendly ground

Muslim soldier fought for America, and his faith

Muslim people are a part of "real America" just as much as Christians and Jews and atheists. What faith, or lack of it, they claim, has nothing to do with being American, loving this nation or being willing to die for the sake of this nation. Faith does not make you a better American but it does often make you appreciate it more when it works the way the Founding Fathers had envisioned it to work. All faiths were supposed to be equal in this nation because the Founding Fathers knew people will not agree on the faith they choose anymore than they will agree on the politicians they support. Even Christians cannot agree with each other. How many branches of Christianity are there today because people could not agree in the first centuries of Christianity? What Americans all agree on is they love this country or they wouldn't live here anymore.

When people disagree with what the government is doing, that does not make them un-American. They expect more out of the abilities of this nation and the rights we have under the Constitution not only allow us to voice our disagreement, it demands it of us. Jefferson knew the importance of being able to be well informed and use our free speech rights as well as he knew the importance of being able to freely choose the faith we have. Some in this country have used their free speech rights to attack people who do not agree with them and call them un-American. They fail to see that what makes the people of America strong is what they have in common as well as what they do not because we are all able to live together in this one nation. This nation made up of the people from many nations coming together as one. They fail to see that as they attack people of other faiths as part of some kind of political game, they are also attacking the men and women who serve this nation in the armed forces. This is just one of their stories.

Muslim soldier fought for America, and his faithBy NANCY A. YOUSSEF
McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON -- "Joe the Plumber" was only one of two Americans injected into the presidential election this past week. The other was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, whom former Secretary of State Colin Powell invoked in his endorsement Sunday of Barack Obama.

Khan was a 20-year-old soldier from Manahawkin, N.J., who wanted to enlist in the Army from the time he was 10. He was an all-American boy who visited Disney World after he completed his training at Fort Benning, Ga., and made his comrades in Iraq watch "Saving Private Ryan" every week.

He was also a Muslim who joined the military, his father said, in part to show his countrymen that not all Muslims are terrorists.

"He was an American soldier first," said his father, Feroze Khan. "But he also looked at fighting in this war as fighting for his faith. He was fighting radicalism."

Khan was killed by an improvised explosive device in August 2007 along with four other soldiers and an Iraqi interpreter while searching a house in Baqouba, Iraq. He's one of four Muslims who served in Iraq or Afghanistan and are buried in Arlington National Cemetery, where 512 troops from those wars now rest.

About 3,700 of the U.S. military's 1.4 million troops are Muslims, according to Defense Department estimates.

Khan, a child of immigrant parents from Trinidad, was 14 when the Sept. 11 attacks happened. Feroze Khan said he remembered his son watching in stunned silence: "I could tell that inside a lot of things were going through his head."

Three years later, Feroze honored his son's request and allowed him to enlist him in the Army.

"I told him: 'You are going to the Army.' I never said there is a war going on in a Muslim country. I didn't want him to get any ideas that he was fighting (against) his religion."

Feroze kept his fears for his son's safety to himself.

His son was assigned to the Stryker Brigade Combat Team out of Fort Lewis, Wash., deployed to Iraq in 2006 and fought on Baghdad's Haifa Street, a Sunni insurgent stronghold.

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http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics/AP/story/735677.html