On Sept. 11, their picture-perfect American life momentarily changed hues. Unmanned tollbooths on an empty interstate unsettled Omar. What had happened was huge, eerie … unknown. At Wayland High School, history was on the mind of his daughter Aliya – but not in an academic way.

"Right after Sept. 11, we almost thought that we might be in internment camps," she says, referring to the detention of Japanese-Americans following Pearl Harbor. "I don't think we thought that the US would ever make that mistake again, but it did cross my mind."

Initial jitters, however, quickly subsided. Mr. Khalidi, his wife Nigar, and Aliya took up an invitation that night to an interfaith gathering at a local church. "We came back very reassured that there is goodwill in this country," Khalidi says. He also found comfort in a general assembly called by the provost at MIT, where Khalidi is a staff member of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. The provost told the students, faculty, and staff that he would have no intolerance of Islam or Muslims on campus. "I thought it was so commendable, and it was needed."

"People like us should and can act as bridges between different cultures," Khalidi says. It wasn't long before the Khalidi family did just that. Khalidi spoke at local churches, schools, and press after "everybody discovered Muslims in their backyard." Then he got an opportunity to pass information in the other direction. The State Department sent Omar on a lecture tour in India and the Middle East to talk about mosque architecture in America.

At times his audiences wanted to steer the conversation toward a different topic: American foreign policy. Khalidi laments that many in the Islamic world have fixated on this one aspect of the US, particularly the relationship with Israel. While Khalidi feels that US foreign policy does not always reflect American values, he believes that, internally, America is closer to what an Islamic society ought to be: tolerant, accepting, and pluralistic. And so he stuck to the topic of architecture, which in a way implied that mosques (and Muslims) have a home in the American landscape.

"I thought that this is a good way to acknowledge America," Khalidi says of the tour. "[America] has enabled me to educate myself, [and] work for a good institution."

Aliya, meanwhile, found her voice at the student newspaper. She first heard the news of the attacks in her journalism class.

"An English teacher had come into class and said, 'Two planes have crashed into the World Trade Center,' and our first reaction was like, 'Oh, we can get a story about that in the paper.'"

As the gravity of the situation set in, Aliya worked with the paper's editor, one of the few other Muslim students, "to get the word out that Muslims aren't really like this." She wrote a story on two speakers who came to the school to talk about Islam. She also shared some of the perspective she has gained in US history classes with younger students at her local mosque.

She can see the results of her work: "Even when I wasn't there I heard about [my friends] defending Islam, and it was nice to know that they learned so much from me and that they learned so much from learning about Islam in school."

– Ben Arnoldy, photo by Stuart S. Cox Jr.