Muslim chaplain breaks new ground

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Heads pop through the doorway of Rumee Ahmed's office at Brown University on a regular basis. Students come looking for a friend, a mentor and a teacher.

"I've been harassing him since the day he came," says junior Refai Arefin, who stops by daily for 15 to 20 minutes of study to improve his understanding of the Quran.

Ahmed is Brown's first Muslim chaplain and joined four other associate chaplains at the school when he started in January. Many universities have Muslim chaplains, but Ahmed is among just a handful that are paid, said Janet Cooper Nelson, chaplain at Brown.

School officials realized that adding a Muslim chaplain was essential to serving their students, and to giving the school better credentials in the Muslim community, Nelson said.

"When you look at the American landscape, when you look at the global landscape," she said, "it's not sufficient anymore to have a Protestant minister, a rabbi and a Catholic priest."

Ahmed is not ordained and comes from an academic background: He is working on his doctorate in scripture interpretation and practice — a mix of philosophy of religion and Islamic studies — at the University of Virginia.

But Nelson said Brown was not looking for an imam. There is no place to study to become an imam in the United States, and Brown wanted someone who had studied at an American university. Further, some students worried that an imam would be divisive.

The priority was to find a person who knows the faith, understands its variations and shows pastoral leadership, Nelson said.

Brown found those qualities in the 26-year-old Ahmed, who says one of his most important jobs is to help Muslim students build a sense of community at Brown. About 4 percent of Brown's undergraduates are Muslim, Nelson said.

"That's a really big challenge is getting all the Muslim students out there together," Ahmed said. The university has 150 Muslim students, but only about 40 regularly attend Friday prayers.

Muslims at Brown come from varying cultures and have an array of beliefs. For example, Ahmed is American, but his parents were born in India and lived in Pakistan and the United States. Other Muslims at Brown come from places the Middle East and Africa.

A challenge, he said, is getting students to express their religiosity however they see fit "and feeling they have a community and they are welcome."