Kambiz GhaneaBassiri is a Muslim. He has a doctorate in Islamic studies from Harvard University and teaches at Reed College. He has one book to his credit and is halfway through writing his second, a history of Islam in the United States since Colonial times.
He is a Carnegie Scholar, one of his profession's highest honors. He is living, for the next year, in Morocco, where he is helping educate more moderate Islamic leaders. He is the father of two children and has been married to his high school sweetheart for 13 years.
He is smart, articulate, thoughtful and innovative. His dark hair and goatee are perfectly trimmed. He seems born to button-down shirts and khaki slacks.
His is a career that many academics would envy. And he is all of 32 years old.
"He was my best teacher, without a doubt," says Sam Kigar, a 2006 Reed graduate. "He taught me that there are simple answers out there. It's just that they rarely fit the questions."
The tough questions and complex answers that GhaneaBassiri grapples with are the same ones that Americans wrestle with if they want to understand Islam and its place in the modern world.
Americans often don't realize that Islam, like Christianity, is incredibly diverse in its expressions, he says. Christians across the world don't agree on every social issue, and neither do Muslims. When he teaches a class on Islam, this is his starting place.
He shows his classes slides of mosques, snapshots taken from around the world: The pencil-thin minarets of Turkey. Mosques made of mud that look like termite hills in West Africa. Rural areas in Saudi Arabia where simple markings on the ground outline a sacred space for prayer. After they see the slides, students such as Kigar begin to realize how culture and context shape expressions of Islam.
"The main thing that I've learned from him is that Islam is whatever its adherents make of it," says Kigar, 22. "Interpretation is always based on a particular context. Reading the Quran as an outsider with today's perspective won't give a holistic view of what Islam is and already has been."
If a life of teaching can be boiled down to one sentence, that one would work for GhaneaBassiri. It is wrong, he says, to draw conclusions about Islam based only on one reading of the Quran, on the statements of a few Muslim leaders or on the culture of one group of believers. It is inaccurate to isolate an issue -- such as Western culture, democracy or the role of women -- and suggest that Muslims have one response to it.
"I don't like talking about Islam in political terms," he says. For that reason, he declines to comment on Osama bin Laden and Zacarias Moussaoui.
"But I hear questions about whether Islam and democracy are compatible, or about whether Islam and women's rights are compatible," he says. "We have all these Muslims living in the United States, participating in a democratic society, and they are excited to do so. Why do we ask whether Islam and democracy are compatible?"
A recent Pew Trust study, which found that Muslims from around the world and non-Muslims in the West are sharply at odds in their perceptions of each other, is "problematic," GhaneaBassiri says.
"What does it mean to treat American Muslims as non-Western when in actuality they are a part of American history?" he asks. Too often, Muslims and non-Muslims do not think of their own experience with each other as much as they respond to extremist views that are reflected by the media.
"If you ask a Muslim, 'What are your perceptions of Westerners?' they are not thinking of their next-door neighbors or their co-workers," he says. "When we ask non-Muslims what they think of Muslims, they, too, are not necessarily thinking about the Muslims they might know but also about the violent acts ascribed to Muslims in the public square."
GhaneaBassiri wants to change the way that Muslims and non-Muslims think and talk about Islam. And he says if he has to do it one person at a time, he will.
Two diverging cultures
On a Monday morning in May, Alma Flores answers the door in stocking feet. The home she shares with GhaneaBassiri and their two children is a block from Gabriel Park. They will leave for Morocco in three weeks, but it doesn't look as if they've started packing yet.
GhaneaBassiri, also in his socks, helps his wife pull together coffee, cream, sugar and a plate of cookielike brittle from Iran. They climb the polished hardwood steps to the living room and sink into an overstuffed loveseat. They are surrounded by paintings that reflect their respective heritages and, on one wall, low shelves that are filled with children's games.
They are engaged in what sounds like an old argument: Whose desserts are sweeter, those from Iran or those from Mexico, where her parents were born. "Mexican treats are pure sugar," he declares.
"Well, some are pure sugar and mango," she counters.
GhaneaBassiri was born in Tehran and came to the Los Angeles area with his parents when he was 10. The older of his parents' two sons, he showed signs of being a teacher by the time he was in middle school. He'd assign his younger brother, Kamyar, to write essays to improve his writing skills.
"I'd always do it," says Kamyar, three years younger and a lawyer in Los Angeles. "There's just something in his presence that made me do it."
GhaneaBassiri spent his freshman year at Reed College and remembers loving the students' and professors' openness to real, scholarly dialogue. However, he admits, he loved a girl more. He transferred to Claremont McKenna College to be close to Flores. They had met as freshmen and dated since their senior prom. She was studying at the University of California at Los Angeles.
They married in their junior year of college. They studied side by side, read and edited each other's papers, and squeezed in dinner and a movie whenever they could. They made a deal with each other that they wouldn't let their marriage interfere with graduate school. Fortunately, GhaneaBassiri got into Harvard, and Flores was admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both in Cambridge, Mass. Their studies separated them by only a couple of bus stops.
Today, Flores is an urban planner for Portland. She's on a year's leave of absence so she can go with her family to Morocco. They left Portland in June with five suitcases: two full of toys and three filled with clothes.
Women as Muslim guides
Morocco's first class of 50 women trained as morchidat, or Muslim religious guides, made headlines in May. They will not preach in mosques, but they will teach men and women about Islam. They are part of the Moroccan government's efforts to educate religious leaders who resist extremist views and will help guide the Muslim country -- and the global Muslim community -- into the 21st century.
Ahmed Toufiq, Moroccan minister of Islamic affairs and endowments, and GhaneaBassiri met when Toufiq was a visiting scholar at Harvard. Toufiq invited GhaneaBassiri to help revise the curriculum at Dar al-Hadith al-Hassania, an Islamic seminary in the city of Rabat. They hope to integrate the study of other religions and the social sciences with courses in Islam. GhaneaBassiri will be a role model of an Islamic scholar with a broader educational background.
William A. Graham, a professor of Islamic studies at Harvard for 33 years was GhaneaBassiri's adviser. Graham knew Toufiq when he was a visiting scholar at the university. Working with Toufiq will be an extraordinary opportunity for GhaneaBassiri, he says.
"Here he is, an Iranian who's lived in the United States being asked to go to Morocco with its totally different culture," Graham says. "It's a testimony to his quality of mind. He is a liberal thinker and a devout Muslim. It's a terrific thing to go and work with a new generation of Muslim leaders, to help them recognize that it is possible to be a religious person and not to be an extremist."
GhaneaBassiri's colleagues at Reed are also impressed.
"This is a remarkable thing," says Steven M. Wasserstrom, who teaches religion at Reed. "To do what used to be more or less routine liberal theology -- well, for Jews and Christians, it's still not that problematic -- but to do it as a Muslim requires a lot of courage."
Wasserstrom, who taught a course on Judaism, Christianity and Islam with GhaneaBassiri at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral a few years ago, has seen how poised, confident and flexible his colleague can be.
And for a scholar who is only 32?
"I never knew, until just now, how old he was," Wasserstrom says. "I'm sitting here, and my mouth just fell open."