A Man of Faith

Abdur-Rashid was born to African-American Southern Baptist parents. The name on his birth certificate is Charles Burris, the same as his father. In 1977, his parents converted to Islam, and Charles Burris Jr. became Khalil Abdur-Rashid. His new name came from two men his father admired, the Lebanese-American poet Khalil Gibran and a Senegalese teacher in the Atlanta Muslim community.

After 9/11, Abdur-Rashid graduated from Georgia State with a bachelor’s degree in social work and spent a couple of years as a caseworker. At the time, he was the only Muslim at the Clayton County Division, so his colleagues would ask him for help serving other Muslims in the community. A pivotal moment came when a juvenile court judge came to Abdur-Rashid for guidance. The judge wanted to know what Islam says about parenting and child abuse.
Abdur-Rashid grew up Muslim, but when the judge asked him for help with the abuse case, he didn’t have an answer.

“Those kinds of discussions weren’t talked about in the mosque or anywhere else, so I didn’t have a clue,” he says. “Here I was in a position to make a difference in someone’s life, and I wasn’t able to do what I should have as a caseworker who comes from a Muslim background. I felt like a failure.”

By that time, the Iraq War had begun and the War on Terror had been underway for almost three years. It was clear the relationship between being American and being Muslim was becoming politically and socially complicated. Abdur-Rashid decided to devote himself to guiding Muslims and non-Muslims through that challenge.

“I wanted to learn about Islam,” he says, “and really help Muslims in American society.”

He resigned from his caseworker position and went overseas to study Islam. After visiting Syria and Yemen, he came home briefly to teach Arabic at Georgia State before relocating to Istanbul, Turkey, to attend seminary. Once he finished his Islamic training, he returned stateside to attend Columbia University in New York City, earning a master of arts degree in Middle East studies and a master of philosophy in Islamic law.

While in New York, he discovered another community that needed guidance.

As a student at Columbia, Abdur-Rashid worked as the prayer leader, or imam, at Iqra Mosque in Brooklyn. Some students heard about his off-campus role and asked if he’d like to volunteer as a chaplain at Columbia. He accepted and became the Muslim Programming Association and Religious Life Adviser at Columbia and Barnard College, where he mentored his fellow Muslim students.

Then came a crisis. In February 2012, the Associated Press broke a story about surveillance the New York Police Department (NYPD) had conducted on Muslim student groups at Columbia, among other schools. Suddenly, the campus wasn’t a place where Muslim students were free to coexist. They were being watched. Abdur-Rashid worked with the president of Columbia and the other university chaplains to help guide the Muslim community through the ordeal.
After the report of surveillance at Columbia, Abdur-Rashid met with NYPD Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who, under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, had doubled down on the city’s profiling practices.

“I described the impact that policy had on Muslim students on campus,” says Abdur-Rashid. “Having that big institution behind me enabled me to speak to power from a stronger platform.”

Abdur-Rashid suggested Kelly assemble an advisory board of people from New York’s Muslim community. Kelly took his advice, creating the NYPD’s Muslim Advisory Council and making Abdur-Rashid a member. Alongside his fellow councilmembers, Abdur-Rashid advised Kelly on police surveillance of mosques and other practices until he finished his studies at Columbia. He then took a job as a clergyman at a large mosque in Texas, working “on the frontlines to battle Islamophobia in Dallas.”

While in Texas, he also helped establish the Islamic Seminary of America, the first of its kind in the United States, to teach Muslim professionals about their faith. He wanted his peers to do better than he did back when the juvenile court judge had looked to a young Abdur-Rashid for guidance and found a blank stare.

Much of Abdur-Rashid’s counseling style comes from his politician father and artist mother. His parents divorced when he was a child and instilled lessons from their separate homes that have proved invaluable.

His father, the late Charles Burris, was the first African-American mayor of Stone Mountain (1997–2001), a town best known for its eponymous pluton carved with the likenesses of Confederate heroes Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis.

When Burris first ran for Stone Mountain City Council five years before his mayorship, James Venable, the former Imperial Wizard of the National Knights of the Klan, supported his run. Burris’ house, where Abdur-Rashid spent a lot of time, was once owned by Venable, too.

In Stone Mountain — the birthplace of the modern Ku Klux Klan and 75 percent black — conflicting views smacked right into each other.

“I saw my father work wonders in Stone Mountain and change it from this place of hate to a place of happiness,” says Abdur-Rashid. “The idea — as my father would like to say — of changing hate into hope resonates with me very strongly, and I take that legacy very seriously. I’d like to think that motivates me when I deal with students and deal with anybody else.”

Burris entered Morehouse College at age 16 and attended Bible classes taught by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. One day, Burris was late to class because a man had picked a fight with him. When King asked Burris if he’d always respond to provocation that way, Burris said he would — that you have to stand up for yourself.

“Dr. King told my father, ‘Young man, so long as someone else provokes you to violence, you will always be a slave,’” Abdur-Rashid says. “That really stuck with him. It’s become a mantra of mine as well. It’s what I try to convey to others, that we cannot let Islamophobia provoke us to become something outside of us. Because we are not slaves. We are not slaves of other people, and we cannot be slaves of ourselves.”

Abdur-Rashid’s mother, Jihan Abdur-Rashid (M.Ed. ’00), is also a Georgia State graduate. Her master’s thesis was on Islamic art.

“From her, I learned the power of representation,” Abdur-Rashid says. “The importance of art and pictures in the lives of people both positively and negatively. How depictions and representations can be destructive, emotive and constructive.”

His mother once painted a picture of the American flag with an African-American Muslim man popping up in the middle of the stripes. For Abdur-Rashid, the meaning was obvious and powerful: Muslims have spilled blood for this country just like every other American group.

Through her art, his mother helped Muslims think differently about who they are as Americans, which Abdur-Rashid hopes to achieve at Harvard.

“Representation is one of our students’ biggest challenges: who represents us in the media and in communities,” he says. “Who should represent us, who speaks for us now, who should not speak for us, whose voices represent us and how do we represent ourselves to our peers and communities?”

After Trump became president amid campaign promises to enact a “complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” Harvard started searching for a full-time Muslim chaplain.

“I understood what it was like for students to be in a traumatic position, whether they felt ostracized, unsupported or victimized,” Abdur-Rashid says. “I felt I had been in a position to help students at Columbia and that I could be in a good position to offer that service again at Harvard.”

He applied and got the job. Now the work begins.

Abdur-Rashid is getting settled in Cambridge after moving there in early July. He has already begun a long “listening tour,” where he’ll spend months speaking with students, faculty, administrators and staff about what’s happening on campus in and around the Muslim community.

“I’m hoping that Muslim students on campus will leave a lot more empowered about their American identity and their Islamic identity than when they arrived,” he says. “I’m also hoping that the larger Harvard, community through my role, are able to better understand the intersection of Islam and America and its indigenous qualities.

“Islam, in the media, has been portrayed as a phenomenon that’s been exported — or imported, depending on how you look at it — to this country,” he adds. “But there’s a forgotten narrative about the indigenous quality of Islam that has been here since the very beginning.”

Abdur-Rashid likes to point out that Muslims have called America home longer than the United States. The first records of Muslims on this land date back nearly 500 years.

Muslims fought alongside the colonists in the Revolutionary War, and Muslim slaves fought in the War of 1812. When President Trump broke tradition this year and didn’t host a White House dinner to celebrate Ramadan, he wasn’t just separating himself from presidents Obama, Bush and Clinton, but also Thomas Jefferson, who hosted a Muslim envoy during Ramadan in 1805.

Abdur-Rashid says he would have taken the Harvard job no matter who had won the election in November.

“I believe that Islamophobia would still be there,” he says. “I still believe students have a crisis of identity in terms of what it means to be an American Muslim. I still believe that non-Muslims could be better informed about Islam and about the junction of Islam and America.”

Abdur-Rashid calls professor of social work Elizabeth Beck the most influential professor he ever had.

“She revolutionized my life because of her approach to social work, her approach to justice, her passion as a teacher, as a scholar, her breadth of knowledge,” he says.

Beck, in turn, says Abdur-Rashid is one of the most interesting students she’s had in her 20 years of teaching. When he was in her undergraduate class, she remembers, he was already taking a leadership role for his fellow Muslims.

“His understated way encourages strong coalitions,” she says.

In his first two weeks at Harvard, Abdur-Rashid has learned Islamophobia is still a major concern for students and administrators. He knows how important it is to address the fear head on, “so that Islam does not become this religious phenomenon that only exists in a clergy or a divinity school.”

He wants Islam, the world’s second most commonly practiced religion, to be relevant to students of all disciplines and faiths. But his first priority is to learn what his campus needs of him. Once he understands the problems that need addressing, he hopes to become a “strong anchor within the institution that students can rely on for mentoring and guidance.”

Abdur-Rashid has his work cut out for him.