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Surviving by Disguising: Nature’s Game of Charades
One bright October morning, Fabiano Calleia, a researcher with the Federal University of Amazonas, was out in the lowland rainforest of Manaus, Brazil, tracking his usual group of eight pied tamarins as the small, dark monkeys with their dapper white shrugs grazed on the fruits of a fig tree. Suddenly the breakfast calm was shattered by the distinctive sound of a baby tamarin’s cry — a series of short, sharp whistles, like a boiling teapot doing Morse code.
A male tamarin clambered up and down the tree, vainly trying to locate the sound’s source. The calling continued. More monkeys became riled.
And then Dr. Calleia saw, to his astonishment, that the cries weren’t coming from a tamarin pup, but rather from a margay, an ocelotlike cat with large eyes, large paws and a large appetite for monkey meat.
The margay was slinking through some nearby vines, simulating simian sounds nonstop as it headed the tamarins’ way. The spotted cat leaped, a sentinel monkey screamed and the entire troop escaped unharmed.
On returning to camp, Dr. Calleia related the event to Fabio Rohe, the program manager for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Amazon program, who immediately thought of what the local inhabitants had told him: that margays and other jungle cats will sometimes hunt by mimicking the vocalizations of their prey.
“I said, this is comparable to monkeys using tools! Let’s write something,” Dr. Rohe recalled in an e-mail interview. “And we started writing in a few days!”
The scientists published their description of the first official “field observation of margay mimicking behavior” in the journal Neotropical Primates last year, but only now is it circulating among field researchers more widely.
The report is just one of a host of recent discoveries of priceless phonies, cases of mimicry from unexpected quarters that, really, by now we should have learned to expect, and that trump in sheer entertainment value the originals on which they are based. Imitation can be the sincerest form of flattery, the severest form of battery or the weirdest survival strategy, and if you think there’s nothing new under the sun, you’re right, but so what: playing copycat turns out to be nature’s perpetual novelty machine.
For example, scientists recently discovered that in some ant species, the queen is a consummate percussionist, equipped with a tiny, uniquely ridged organ for stridulating out royal fanfares that help keep her workers in line. Who knew that the queen was such a squeezebox? Her freeloaders sure did. The scientists also discovered parasitic butterfly larvae in the colony that use their abdominal muscles or other body parts to precisely imitate the queen’s stridulations, an act of musical piracy that induces worker ants to flutter and fuss and regurgitate food right into the parasites’ mouths.
Baby German cockroaches of both sexes have been found to mimic the smell and feel of adult female cockroaches, the better to dupe adult males into spreading their wings and exposing the hidden pantries beneath — pools of beery maltose sugar, proteins and fats. The males synthesize the expensive secretions as a courtship gift to woo mates, but cockroach nymphs, with their unslakable sweet mandible, have evolved the chemical and textural means to vamp. A gentle tap of a segmented antenna infused with a knockoff version of femme fertile perfume, and the male says, go ahead, hop aboard, eat the flirt off my back.
Within-species mimicry is generally rare in nature, said Coby Schal, a professor of entomology at North Carolina State University, who recently reported with his colleagues in Animal Behaviour on the gambit they dubbed jail baiting. Then again, he added, “humans have provided cockroaches with the sort of artificial ecologies that generate really unusual behaviors.” An unpredictable food supply, scant access to soil and the essential nitrogen it holds: no wonder young roaches must know how to scam.
Perhaps the most remarkable case of mimicry to come to light lately is that of the mimic octopus of Indonesia, with so many shape-shifting, shade-changing tricks at its disposal even eight sleeves cannot hold them. A report published this month in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society presents the evolutionary backstory to Thaumoctopus mimicus, a marine mollusk that was discovered and described only in the last dozen years. Like most octopuses, T. mimicus can use its nervous system to instantly change colors into a perfect wallpaper blend. Unlike most other octopuses, the mimic will sometimes choose to make itself more conspicuous to potential predators, rather than less. If it must venture out to forage in dangerous open waters, it assumes a menacing disguise appropriate to context. Before swimming above the seafloor, the octopus gives a shudder, and presto, its flesh becomes boldly striped, its arms and body resolve into a leafy, spiny form: it’s a toxic lionfish. For skating along the sea bottom, the octopus turns its skin bumpy and beige, compresses its body, pulls its limbs to its side: it’s a toxic flatfish, undulating its fins, staring you down with its top-sided eyes.
“When it’s being pestered by a damselfish, it will turn one of its arms into a sea snake, with the contrasting banding pattern of a sea snake, and with the tip of the arm thickened to look like the snake’s head,” said Healy Hamilton, a biodiversity and informatics expert at the California Academy of Sciences and an author on the report. “Sea snakes are voracious predators of damselfish.”
None of the octopus’s imitations are perfect, and they don’t need to be. “If the predator just takes pause,” said Dr. Healy, “the octopus can ink and jet propulse away.”
We humans also like our mimicry in small, imperfect doses. Nobody wants to be blatantly mocked or pyramid scammed, and bashing mimes, like hating clowns, is a remarkably popular sport. Yet psychologists are coming to appreciate the profound importance of nonconscious mimicry in making us feel loved and appreciated, or simply smoothing the edges of our everyday affairs. Without realizing it, when we’re conversing with friends, we match our tone of voice and speech rhythms to theirs, adopt similar body posture and even imitate their tics. Studies have shown that, when students are instructed to work cooperatively with somebody who engages in either repeated hair touching or foot shaking, the students soon start fiddling with their hair or waggling a foot. Waiters who repeat their customers’ orders word for word, or who subtly mimic a customer’s body language, earn higher tips than do waiters who paraphrase the order or forgo the gestural mirroring.
Rick van Baaren’s laboratory at Radboud University in the Netherlands recently determined that, in subjects who were forced to socialize with somebody who had been instructed to avoid all forms of verbal and behavioral mimicry, cortisol levels shot up, and it took repeated normal, mimetic exchanges to bring their stress hormones back down.
“I think the negative effect of not being imitated is even stronger than the positive effect of being imitated,” said Dr. van Baaren.
Unless you’re a margay trying to make a monkey out of me.
In a New Role, Teachers Move to Run Schools
Shortly after landing at Malcolm X Shabazz High School as a Teach for America recruit, Dominique D. Lee grew disgusted with a system that produced ninth graders who could not name the seven continents or the governor of their state. He started wondering: What if I were in charge?
Three years later, Mr. Lee, at just 25, is getting a chance to find out. Today, Mr. Lee and five other teachers — all veterans of Teach for America, a corps of college graduates who undergo five weeks of training and make a two-year commitment to teaching — are running a public school here with 650 children from kindergarten through eighth grade.
As the doors opened on Thursday at Brick Avon Academy, they welcomed students not as novice teachers following orders from the central office, but as “teacher-leaders.”
“This is a fantasy,” Mr. Lee said. “It’s six passionate people who came together and said, ‘Enough is enough.’ We’re just tired of seeing failure.”
The Newark teachers are part of a growing experiment around the country to allow teachers to step up from the classroom and lead efforts to turn around struggling urban school systems. Brick Avon is one of the first teacher-run schools in the New York region, joining a charter school in Brooklyn started in 2005 by the United Federation of Teachers.
Others have opened in Boston, Denver, Detroit and Los Angeles.
At Brick Avon, the principal, Charity Haygood, who calls herself the “principal teacher,” teaches every day, as do the two vice principals; Ms. Haygood started her career in Teach for America and eventually became vice principal for five years at another school.
While they are in charge of disciplining and evaluating staff members, they plan to defer all decisions about curriculum, policies, hiring and the budget to a governance committee made up largely of teachers elected by colleagues.
The school has 38 teachers, including Mr. Lee, Ms. Haygood and the other four Teach for America veterans who took it over.
Teachers have more say over what they teach, and starting next year they will have more time to work with children when they introduce a longer day.
To an unusual degree, they are shown they matter, as with the air fresheners left in the faculty lounge and bathrooms, or the new air-conditioner that will be raffled off at the end of the month to a teacher with perfect attendance.
Driving the establishment of teacher-run schools is the idea that teachers who have a sense of ownership of their schools will be happier and more motivated.
But some educators and parents question whether such schools are the solution for urban districts, which typically have large concentrations of poor students and struggle with low test scores and discipline problems.
They say that most teachers have neither the time nor the expertise to deal with the inner workings of a school, like paying bills, conducting fire drills and refereeing faculty disputes.
“Ever try to plan a vacation with a large extended family? That’s what it’s going to be like,” said Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy group in Washington. “It’s a good idea in theory, but there are just a handful of teachers who can pull it off.”
On the steps of Brick Avon last week, Lisa James, 26, a home health aide with a daughter in second grade, said she worried that teachers doubling as administrators would lose their focus.
“Teachers should be teachers,” she said.
Teacher-run schools are spreading as many districts seek new ways to raise student achievement and compete more effectively against charter schools.
This year, Los Angeles has turned over 29 city schools to groups of local teachers who worked with parents, administrators and union leaders to beat out established charter operators like Green Dot Public Schools.
Detroit is opening an elementary school without a principal; its motto is “Where teachers lead, children succeed.”
Another school with no principal was started last year by the Boston Teachers Union, with teachers ordering supplies, giving feedback to one another and deciding whose hours to reduce to save money.
“It’s really a collaborative environment,” said Betsy Drinan, 57, a teacher-leader at the Boston school. “I haven’t worked in schools before where they come to you and say ‘What do you want’ and ‘What do you need?’ ”
While teacher-run schools started as early as the mid-1990s, most had fewer than 350 students or were charter schools, including some teacher-owned cooperatives in Minnesota.
Tim McDonald, an associate with Education Evolving, a policy group in St. Paul that supports teacher-led schools, said studies showed that when teachers were given control — much like doctors or lawyers running their own practices — schools had higher morale, less turnover, more efficient decision-making and greater motivation to improve.
Still, Mr. McDonald was skeptical that a truly collaborative model could succeed widely in school districts, unless it was somehow freed from the traditional bureaucracy.
“You’re trying to run an upside-down pyramid in a pyramid structure,” he said. “There is so much momentum against being completely different in most districts.”
James H. Lytle, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania who teaches a course on urban school reform to Teach for America teachers, said the test of school leaders was whether they could make a school work smoothly.
Teachers, he said, “want the textbooks to be there and the students to come on time.”
“The question is whether teachers have the patience to do the ‘adminis-trivia,’ ” said Dr. Lytle, a former principal and superintendent in Philadelphia and Trenton.
The union-run UFT Charter School in East New York, Brooklyn, has run into problems. Two principals resigned after clashing with teachers, and recent test scores have been disappointing; only 22 percent of last year’s eighth graders passed state tests in English and 13 percent in math, compared with citywide rates of 37.5 percent in English and 46.3 percent in math.
Here in Newark, Mr. Lee and his partners — Ms. Haygood; Chris Perpich, who is one of the vice principals; Bernadette Scott; Princess Williams; and Mindy Weidman — worked at night and on weekends for 18 months to develop the blueprint for Brick, which is an acronym for Building Responsible Intelligent Creative Kids.
The school has a global focus, with plans to seek approval as an International Baccalaureate school and to require Mandarin as well as Spanish.
The group asked Newark district officials for a school to run in the South Ward, a poor, crime-ridden section of the city, because, as Mr. Lee put it, “you go where the need is greatest.”
They were given the former Avon Avenue School. In 2009, only 38 percent of Avon’s eighth graders passed state tests in language arts and 14 percent in math, compared with 82.5 percent and 71.8 percent statewide.
Mr. Lee, soft-spoken and unflappable, raced through the school last week, handing out class lists to teachers, security guards, even a surprised custodian. Later, he was wiping down cafeteria tables for lunch.
“It has to get done, so teachers can focus on teaching,” said Mr. Lee, who serves as Brick Avon’s operations manager as well as executive director of Brick, but also will be teaching in the school.
The teachers are raising money — $125,000 so far — to pay for extras like teacher training and an after-school program for students. They have tried to build good will in the community by holding a barbecue in the schoolyard, stopping by block parties and knocking on families’ doors.
The day before classes started, Ms. Haygood, the principal, stood before the other 37 teachers in the auditorium, two-thirds of whom had previously taught at Avon. She read from the book “If You Don’t Feed the Teachers, They Eat the Students.”
Then she shared her vision of a collaborative teacher-run school and asked them to demonstrate how they planned to take charge. Those without enough enthusiasm, she joked, would be required to get Brick tattooed on their backs.
Some teachers sashayed across the floor, while others cheered B-R-I-C-K. A group that included the music teacher broke into song. One teacher even slid into a split.
Afterward, Ms. Haygood asked them to jot down their feelings about the coming year.
Ed Crisafulli, 57, a science teacher working for his eighth principal at Avon, wrote down “hopeful” and then “finally.”
“We finally have someone who is a teacher,” he said, “someone who understands teachers from the smallest little thing to the biggest.”
A Ramadan Drumbeat Is Sounded in Queens
It was just past 4 the other morning when Mohammad Boota pulled his Lincoln Town Car into a service station on an industrial stretch in Long Island City, Queens, and bounded out — a typhoon of embroidered fabric, good cheer and unusual urgency.
“I’m late today,” he explained as he popped the car trunk, hauled out a barrel drum, grabbed two rough-hewn wooden sticks and, as a few bewildered mechanics watched, pounded out a galloping rhythm. The clamor echoed off a nearby hotel.
Mr. Boota, a limousine driver, has built a sideline as a ceremonial drummer for his fellow Pakistani immigrants. He is also New York City’s foremost — and perhaps only — Ramadan drummer. A few hours before dawn during the holy month of Ramadan, drummers throughout the Muslim world take to the streets to wake the faithful in time for a meal before the daytime fast.
Mr. Boota, 54, introduced the ritual to the darkened streets of Brooklyn about eight years ago. But after his drumming roused a spate of noise complaints, he restricted himself to a few blocks along Coney Island Avenue, where many Muslims live. This year, however, he has decided to push back — gently. Ramadan began on Aug. 11 and ends on Thursday, and on this recent morning Mr. Boota was taking the tradition farther afield, pioneering new drumming territory in Queens.
His plan was cautious. He intended to play only in front of Pakistani-owned businesses — gas stations, corner stores, restaurants — and never as loudly as he might were he in, say, Islamabad or Karachi.
“I’m not going to play where people have a problem,” he said, wearing a shimmering orange shalwar kameez — a traditional two-piece outfit — and a matching turban. “We, the Muslim people, already have so many issues.”
“I want people happy, dancing, eating,” he added. “I want to keep everybody happy.”
He was responding to demand, he explained. Since The New York Times published an article about him last year, Pakistanis and other Muslims have asked him to come play on their blocks.
“They say, ‘Why don’t you come to our place, too?’ ” said Mr. Boota, who immigrated in 1992 and lives with his wife and eight children in Coney Island. “They want me. Everybody happy!”
But now time was of the essence: Only about half an hour remained before everyone would already be up and heading to morning prayer. In the history of Ramadan, countless drummers have been stayed from their rounds by war, flood and pestilence, but probably none by early-morning tie-ups on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
As Mr. Boota hammered at his drum in the service station, a Pakistani mechanic whooped, pulled out a cellphone and began dancing a jerky, head-wobbling two-step, holding his phone aloft, relaying the performance to a friend at the other end of the line.
Less than a minute later, however, Mr. Boota abruptly stopped. “Ready to go?” he asked, before jumping into his car.
Several blocks north, he pulled into another service station, Punjab Auto Repair, also Pakistani-owned. Same drill.
As he plastered the walls of the mechanic’s bay with percussive sound, Imran, the manager, said Mr. Boota was maintaining an important custom, even if its usefulness had been eclipsed long ago by the alarm clock.
“It’s Pakistani culture,” said Imran, who gave only his first name. Then he nodded at Mr. Boota. “He’s a very famous guy,” he said, proudly.
Suddenly, Mr. Boota was back in his car. “Thank you, mister,” he called out the window to a mechanic. “God bless you, Monday-to-Friday guy!” And in short order, he had driven several more blocks north, played inside a nearly empty Pakistani restaurant in Astoria, and was barreling southeast on the B.Q.E. toward Jackson Heights.
Even though the debate over a planned Islamic center near ground zero has made some Muslims in New York fearful of calling attention to themselves, Mr. Boota never considered suspending his street drumming.
“This is America — America has a Constitution, freedom of religion,” he said. “We’re not doing anything wrong.” He blamed politicians for inflaming the issue. “The political people are just trying to make the big smoke,” he said.
Arriving in Jackson Heights, he parked on Broadway, where two large Pakistani restaurants face each other from opposite sides of the street. Except for two men drinking coffee on the sidewalk, the block was empty. Mr. Boota shattered the quiet.
“What is this?” one man asked. “Is this somebody’s birthday?”
Several others came to the windows of Gourmet Sweets and Restaurant. The owner teased him about arriving so late.
“Time is gone,” Mr. Boota sighed, stepping inside the restaurant and playing briefly.
“It’s like my big family,” he said, then sat down for a cup of tea.
Bedbugs? Other Strange Invaders Threaten Much Wider Damage
You have perhaps heard about the bugs. In fact, it’s hard to turn on the television or read a newspaper without hearing more about bedbugs. In your mattress, at the office, the theater, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, the Empire State Building — from New York to Portland, it’s the summer’s It bug.
But at the Cornell University Agroforestry Resource Center in the Catskills, they are more concerned with a less celebrated bug, the emerald ash borer. Native to China, it was first detected in the United States in Michigan in 2002 — perhaps arriving in packing material with shipments to auto plants. Since then it has spread across the upper Midwest and into Canada, killing tens of millions of ash trees. It was first reported in New York in June 2009 in Cattaraugus County in southwestern New York.
This June it was discovered in Ulster and Greene Counties in the Catskills, including in the Catskill Forest Preserve. The larvae of the ash borer, a beetle with metallic green wing covers, burrow into tree bark, killing the tree in one to three years. There is no known systemic way to stop its spread or to save infested trees.
Entomologists say the bug, smaller than a penny, has the potential to kill off the 900 million ash trees in New York and the 7 billion ash trees in North America, driving the ash to extinction in a way that would surpass the damage that all but killed off the American chestnut and the elm.
“I’ve been a forest entomologist for 30 years, and I had no idea anything as bad as this could ever happen,” Mark C. Whitmore, an expert on the ash borer at Cornell, said. “The only worse thing would be the spread of the Asian longhorn beetle.”
As metaphor, the tale of two bugs, bedbug and ash borer, is perhaps too pat but is still true: Under our nose or in our bed, any pest is a huge pest, even one that causes serious annoyance but doesn’t carry disease. For those far away, out of sight, we’ll wait until disaster stares us in the face before we pay attention.
Ash trees make up 7 percent of the trees in New York State and about 10 percent of the hardwoods. Losing the ash trees, which are strong and elastic, and are used for, among other things, bows, tool handles and baseball bats, would have enormous economic costs. Beyond industrial and forestry losses, one of the biggest costs would be to individuals and municipalities that would have to cut down brittle, dead trees by the millions to avoid the danger of falling, damaged limbs.
Beyond that, the cost to the health and diversity of the forests and ecosystems that depend on them can only be guessed at.
“Nobody knows how it’s going to impact the overall function and composition of the forest,” said Marilyn Wyman of Cornell Cooperative Extension, who is working to educate people in the Catskills about the emerald ash borer. “You can’t continue to take pieces out of the system and not have something happen.”
FOR now, she and others are desperately trying to spread the word that the best way to slow the infestation’s spread is to not move firewood. The bugs fly, but it is believed that their rapid spread from the far western part of New York to the Catskills came in untreated wood used at campsites. Since 2008, it has been illegal to bring into the state or transport for more than 50 miles untreated wood that has not been kiln-dried to meet state standards.
The ash borer is only one among dozens of types of invasive plants, animals, insects and pathogens in New York alone that reflect the way human activity, usually unwitting, is altering the environment. Most recently, an invasive Asian clam, Corbicula fluminea, blamed for algal blooms that clouded Lake Tahoe, has been found in Lake George.
And the disruptions to the environment go well beyond invasive creatures, like the dire reports this summer of drastic declines, probably because of higher temperatures, in the ocean phytoplanktonthat support much of the life on earth. Weather is not climate, but in this hottest summer ever recorded in New York, in the earth’s hottest decade ever measured, one historically torrid year after another, it gets increasingly difficult to credibly refute the notion that human behavior is affecting the earth’s climate, just as it is affecting those forests, lakes and trees.
Still, on a lovely final weekend of summer, with Hurricane Earl blundering out to sea and with no shortage of ways to amuse, distract and entertain ourselves, it is easy to worry about what’s in our bed and ignore what’s in our future.
From the Other Side of Ground Zero, Anti-Muslim Venom
The Internet evangelist Bill Keller moved toward the dais in tiny, quick steps on Sunday, exhibiting the anticipation of a man ready to address a crowd. Roughly 60 people stood before him in a hotel meeting room in Lower Manhattan, temporary quarters of his Christian center, his response to the mosque planned for an empty building nearby.
“If we’re going to do something in New York City, we’re going to do something that’s not just bold and visible, but something that has a lasting presence,” said Mr. Keller, who is from the Tampa Bay area of Florida.
Later, he told reporters that Muslims “can go to their mosque and preach the lies of Islam and I’ll come here to preach the truth of the Gospel.”
Since its organizers attended a community board meeting four months ago, the mosque — part of a Muslim community center that would offer a day care center, an auditorium and a pool — quickly became fodder for a national debate. Much of the opposition is over its location: two blocks north of ground zero.
Mr. Keller promoted his center, which he called the 9/11 Christian Center at Ground Zero, as a religious counterweight to the mosque, which he repeatedly called a “victory mosque” or a monument to “a great Muslim military accomplishment,” as he explained it at the inaugural service at the New York Marriott Downtown Hotel on West Street, two blocks south of ground zero.
His career arc makes him a somewhat unusual standard-bearer: Mr. Keller became a preacher after serving a sentence in federal prison for insider trading, as he says in a biography posted on his Web site.
He has also appeared on Howard Stern’s satellite radio show and once had a program on national television, which was canceled after he called Islam a “1,400-year-old lie from the pits of hell.” The program is now carried by a small station in Florida.
But it is on the Internet that Mr. Keller has assembled his largest following. He claims that 20,000 people visit his Web site daily and 2.5 million receive his daily sermon by e-mail.
His service at the Marriott brought together people who expressed admiration, disapproval and curiosity. A man yelled, “Muslims pray five times a day,” but Mr. Keller carried on undisturbed, denouncing Islam as a religion that preaches “hate, violence and death.” The man eventually left.
Mr. Keller also described the conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck, who is a Mormon, and Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam who is behind the Muslim community center, as followers of false faiths. Later, he called the mosque’s potential worshipers guilty of terrorism by association, saying it was “their Muslim brothers” who “flew airplanes into the World Trade Center towers and killed 3,000 people.”
A woman who said she had driven in from Scranton, Pa., pulled Mr. Keller aside afterward and told him that his Christian center “needs to be here,” but she asked if he could tame his language so he would not come across as such a firebrand. He told her he had to talk exactly the way he did if he wanted people to follow him.
Prebem Andersen, 60, who lives in South Salem, N.Y., said Mr. Keller had “told the truth from a Christian perspective.” Richard Borkowski, who lives in Manhattan on the West Side, wore a black T-shirt with the words “Peace Through Understanding.”
Mr. Keller plans to be at the hotel every Sunday until the end of the year and then move the center on Jan. 1 to a permanent spot, although he said he would not disclose its location until Oct. 1.
“I have three locations in contract, but I won’t say where because I don’t want people picketing outside and ruining the deal,” he said.
He is relying on donations to cover the costs of his weekly services, which total $7,000. He said he would need $1 million to run the center for its first year from its permanent home, which would be open seven days a week. He did not seem concerned about finding the money.
“There are a lot more people than you’d imagine who believe in what I’m doing,” he said.
American Muslims Ask, Will We Ever Belong?
For nine years after the attacks of Sept. 11, many American Muslims made concerted efforts to build relationships with non-Muslims, to make it clear they abhor terrorism, to educate people about Islam and to participate in interfaith service projects. They took satisfaction in the observations by many scholars that Muslims in America were more successful and assimilated than Muslims in Europe.
Now, many of those same Muslims say that all of those years of work are being rapidly undone by the fierce opposition to a Muslim cultural center near ground zero that has unleashed a torrent of anti-Muslim sentiments and a spate of vandalism. The knifing of a Muslim cab driver in New York City has also alarmed many American Muslims.
“We worry: Will we ever be really completely accepted in American society?” said Dr. Ferhan Asghar, an orthopedic spine surgeon in Cincinnati and the father of two young girls. “In no other country could we have such freedoms — that’s why so many Muslims choose to make this country their own. But we do wonder whether it will get to the point where people don’t want Muslims here anymore.”
Eboo Patel, a founder and director of Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based community service program that tries to reduce religious conflict, said, “I am more scared than I’ve ever been — more scared than I was after Sept. 11.”
That was a refrain echoed by many American Muslims in interviews last week. They said they were scared not as much for their safety as to learn that the suspicion, ignorance and even hatred of Muslims is so widespread. This is not the trajectory toward integration and acceptance that Muslims thought they were on.
Some American Muslims said they were especially on edge as the anniversary of 9/11 approaches. The pastor of a small church in Florida has promised to burn a pile of Korans that day. Muslim leaders are telling their followers that the stunt has been widely condemned by Christian and other religious groups and should be ignored. But they said some young American Muslims were questioning how they could simply sit by and watch the promised desecration.
They liken their situation to that of other scapegoats in American history: Irish Roman Catholics before the nativist riots in the 1800s, the Japanese before they were put in internment camps during World War II.
Muslims sit in their living rooms, aghast as pundits assert over and over that Islam is not a religion at all but a political cult, that Muslims cannot be good Americans and that mosques are fronts for extremist jihadis. To address what it calls a “growing tide of fear and intolerance,” the Islamic Society of North America plans to convene a summit of Christian, Muslim and Jewish leaders in Washington on Tuesday.
Young American Muslims who are trying to figure out their place and their goals in life are particularly troubled, said Imam Abdullah T. Antepli, the Muslim chaplain at Duke University.
“People are discussing what is the alternative if we don’t belong here,” he said. “There are jokes: When are we moving to Canada, when are we moving to Sydney? Nobody will go anywhere, but there is hopelessness, there is helplessness, there is real grief.”
Mr. Antepli just returned from a trip last month with a rabbi and other American Muslim leaders to Poland and Germany, where they studied the Holocaust and the events that led up to it (the group issued a denunciation of Holocaust denial on its return).
“Some of what people are saying in this mosque controversy is very similar to what German media was saying about Jews in the 1920s and 1930s,” he said. “It’s really scary.”
American Muslims were anticipating a particularly joyful Ramadan this year. For the first time in decades, the monthlong holiday fell mostly during summer vacation, allowing children to stay up late each night for the celebratory iftar dinner, breaking the fast, with family and friends.
But the season turned sour.
The great mosque debate seems to have unleashed a flurry of vandalism and harassment directed at mosques: construction equipment set afire at a mosque site in Murfreesboro, Tenn; a plastic pig with graffiti thrown into a mosque in Madera, Calif.; teenagers shooting outside a mosque in upstate New York during Ramadan prayers. It is too soon to tell whether hate crimes against Muslims are rising or are on pace with previous years, experts said. But it is possible that other episodes are going unreported right now.
“Victims are reluctant to go public with these kinds of hate incidents because they fear further harassment or attack,” said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “They’re hoping all this will just blow over.”
Some Muslims said their situation felt more precarious now — under a president who is perceived as not only friendly to Muslims but is wrongly believed by many Americans to be Muslim himself — than it was under President George W. Bush.
Mr. Patel explained, “After Sept. 11, we had a Republican president who had the confidence and trust of red America, who went to a mosque and said, ‘Islam means peace,’ and who said ‘Muslims are our neighbors and friends,’ and who distinguished between terrorism and Islam.”
Now, unlike Mr. Bush then, the politicians with sway in red state America are the ones whipping up fear and hatred of Muslims, Mr. Patel said.
“There is simply the desire to paint an entire religion as the enemy,” he said. Referring to Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the founder of the proposed Muslim center near ground zero, “What they did to Imam Feisal was highly strategic. The signal was, we can Swift Boat your most moderate leaders.”
Several American Muslims said in interviews that they were stunned that what provoked the anti-Muslim backlash was not even another terrorist attack but a plan by an imam known for his work with leaders of other faiths to build a Muslim community center.
This year, Sept. 11 coincides with the celebration of Eid, the finale to Ramadan, which usually lasts three days (most Muslims will begin observing Eid this year on Sept. 10). But Muslim leaders, in this climate, said they wanted to avoid appearing to be celebrating on the anniversary of 9/11. Several major Muslim organizations have urged mosques to use the day to participate in commemoration events and community service.
Ingrid Mattson, the president of the Islamic Society of North America, said many American Muslims were still hoping to salvage the spirit of Ramadan.
“In Ramadan, you’re really not supposed to be focused on yourself,” she said. “It’s about looking out for the suffering of other people. Somehow it feels bad to be so worried about our own situation and our own security, when it should be about empathy towards others.”
Zoning Law Aside, Mosque Projects Face Battles
In disputes over the construction and expansion of mosques in California, New York, Tennessee and elsewhere, supporters of the projects tend to invoke constitutional principles of religious freedom.
But to experts in land-use planning, the area of law that directly concerns the controversies scattered across the nation, the way to resolve such conflicts is in a more modern document than the Constitution. These fights are often all but moot, from a legal perspective at least, because of a federal law with an ungainly acronym.
“Every planner and zoning lawyer I’ve talked to about this is saying the same thing — Rluipa,” said Daniel Lauber, a past president of the American Planning Association.
The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, whose initials are commonly pronounced Ruh-LOO-pa, was approved unanimously by Congress in 2000. Its chief sponsor was Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah.
The law sets a high bar for any government action that would impose zoning or other restrictions on a religious institution. Any such action must serve a “compelling government interest” while also being “the least restrictive means” of furthering that interest, the law says.
Despite the clear advantage that the law gives to religious institutions, disputes over the construction of mosques have emerged around the country.
In Murfreesboro, Tenn., an arson at the site of a mosque project has raised tensions. In Temecula, Calif., some mosque opponents brought dogs to a protest, thinking it would offend Muslims who believe the animals to be unclean. Backers withdrew the planned expansion of a mosque in Brentwood, Tenn., after critics raised their voices.
The opposition often reflects America’s complicated attitudes toward the Middle East, in which passions run high and even basic facts are treated as objects of contention. The conservative New English Review stated the fundamental question as “whether Islam is a religion or a political doctrine seeking domination with a thin veneer of religious practices.”
To some experts, opposition to construction of the mosque and community center near ground zero, especially by religious organizations, seems surprising.
“It is quite interesting that some of the current opponents of the mosque construction, specifically Jewish leaders and conservative Christians, were formerly quite ardent supporters of the religious freedom offered by the religious land use act,” said Scott L. Thumma, a sociology of religion professor at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut.
The controversy does not split neatly along political lines. Some Democrats, including the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, have voiced concern over plans to build the Islamic center, while Republicans like Mr. Hatch insist that the government stick to the principles of religious liberty for which the law stands.
“Clearly, the proponents of the mosque have a legal and a constitutional right to build a house of worship on private property,” Mr. Hatch said in a statement, referring to the project in Manhattan.
Like Senator Reid and President Obama, however, Mr. Hatch noted that having a legal right to build the project did not necessarily mean that it was wise to do so.
“The question in this case is whether, given the inflamed passions of the community — including those of many people who lost family members on 9/11 — building the mosque at that location is a good idea,” he said.
Opponents of new mosque construction often cite factors other than religion, like parking and traffic, when houses of worship expand. But religion often remains part of the mix. In a statement on the mosque protest in Temecula, William Rench, the senior pastor of the nearby Calvary Baptist Church, said, “Our primary concern is that the land adjacent to our property is wholly inadequate and unsuited for the proposed 25,000-square-foot Islamic worship center.”
The rest of the statement concerns Islam itself. “It seems logical to me that we would be opposed to Islam based on its fundamental teachings and on documented stories of the terror that radical Islam promotes,” Mr. Rench wrote.
In an interview, Mr. Rench said that questions of national and local security should override land-use rules, though in the case of the mosque next door, “I don’t think they represent the more extreme elements of Islam.” Still, he added, “how are we going to get assurances that it’s never going to be an issue?”
Mahmoud Harmoush, the imam of the mosque, said that accusations of radicalism “really are not worth responding to,” and that despite the importance of Shariah, or Islamic law, to their faith, “we are bound by the law of the land,” just as someone who learns to drive in Britain must drive on the right side of the road in the United States.
No one knows what will happen in coming years or the next generation, Mr. Harmoush said, but “the future could be much better than Mr. Rench is imagining.” The mosque might, he said, for example, provide overflow parking for the church.
Patrick Richardson, the planning and development director for the City of Temecula, called the issue “very straightforward.”
“This is nothing related to politics or religion,” he said, “and the law basically precludes us from making that part of the decision-making process.”
The mosque will come up for its first public hearing in November, after the proponents complete a traffic study recommended by the city.
“I can’t say I’m surprised that there is controversy about this,” Mr. Richardson said. “I’m probably a little more disappointed than anything.”
In Willowbrook, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, plans for a mosque and community center have run into opposition that has focused locally on grounds of parking, traffic and water runoff. But anti-Muslim Web sites have tried to fold that opposition into the broader fight over Islam.
Dr. M. A. Hamadeh, a pulmonologist who is the president of the Muslim Educational and Cultural Center of America, which is building the mosque, said news of other conflicts around the country troubled him.
“This is the greatest country in the world, and the greatness is based in freedom — freedom of religion, freedom of association, and of separation between state and religion,” Dr. Hamadeh said. “In order to continue to be a great country, we have to continue to uphold these values.”
Accepted Notion of Mars as Lifeless Is Challenged
For all the triumph of NASA’s 1976 Viking mission, which put two unmanned spacecraft on Mars, there was one major disappointment: The landers failed to find carbon-based molecules that could serve as the building blocks of life.
The complete lack of these organic molecules was a surprise, and the notion of a desolate, lifeless Mars persisted for years.
Now, some scientists say that conclusion was premature and perhaps even incorrect. They suggest that such building blocks — known as organic molecules, although they need not come from living organisms — were indeed in the soil, but that they were inadvertently destroyed before they could be detected.
If true, that could cast the scientific conclusions of the Viking mission in a new light, especially since another Viking experiment claimed to have found living microbes in the soil. Most scientists discounted that possibility — how could there be life in soil devoid of the building blocks of life?
“That gospel of the Viking results has influenced our perspective on life of Mars for 35 years,” said Christopher McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California and an author of the new findings, to be published in The Journal of Geophysical Research — Planets. “What do they find? Nothing. But it turns out it was not really nothing.”
The Viking 1 and Viking 2 landers scooped Martian soil samples and heated them, looking for organic compounds in the released gases. It found only two — chloromethane and dichloromethane — and the scientists concluded that the chlorine compounds were contaminants from fluids used to clean the spacecraft.
Then in 2008, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander unexpectedly found a chlorine chemical, perchlorate, in the planet’s arctic soil.
In the new experiments, the scientists heated a mixture of perchlorate with soil from the Atacama Desert in Chile, often considered the closest thing on Earth to Mars. Chemical reactions destroyed organic compounds in the soil, producing mostly carbon dioxide and traces of chloromethane and dichloromethane, just like what the Viking landers had found.
“Now when we look back at the Viking results, it makes sense,” Dr. McKay said. “It was bizarre chemistry.”
For the veteran Mars researcher Gilbert V. Levin, the new paper offers a measure of vindication. His Viking experiment added nutrients to the soil and measured releases of radioactive gas, which would occur as microbes ate the food. Radioactive gas was released, but with the lack of organics in the soil, most concluded it had come from a nonbiological chemical reaction.
Rafael Navarro-González of the National Autonomous University of Mexico City and lead author of the new study, said the claim that Viking found life was still inconclusive. “It gives a big possibility,” he said, “but of course we don’t know.”
Dr. Levin acknowledged that nonbiological reactions could cause gas to be released, but said the Viking experiment showed that whatever was producing the gas did so at temperatures plausible for microbes but not for other explanations.
But the leader of the Viking organics experiment, Klaus Biemann, a retired professor at M.I.T., doubts the new interpretation. He noted that the experiment also detected freon, which was certainly a contaminant, and that the presence of perchlorate at the Viking sites, far from where the Phoenix landed, was speculation.
More definitive answers could come with the Mars Science Laboratory, scheduled to be launched next year and to arrive in 2012. It will carry an experiment that will be able to separate perchlorates from organic molecules and thus allow it to identify the organics without destroying them.
A Mosque Invisible to Many Is a Target
The small congregation established a mosque here three decades ago in a 19th-century farmhouse surrounded by apple orchards and cornfields. In the farmhouse’s simple prayer room, they prayed for many things, including peace and quiet that has never fully come.
The local sheriff said some in his county did not even know that the mosque was there. Nevertheless, over the years, burglars have stolen prayer rugs and religious tapestries from the small sanctuary, the only Islamic place of worship in rural Orleans County, which hugs the shore of Lake Ontario between Buffalo and Rochester. Vandals have shattered car windows and thrown beer bottles on the lawn. One night about five years ago, the wooden fence in front of the mosque was set afire.
And then, this week, a car filled with local teenagers sideswiped the 29-year-old son of one of the mosque’s founding members, said Joseph V. Cardone, the Orleans County district attorney. One teenager was charged with firing a shotgun into the air near the mosque a few days earlier, after driving by and shouting epithets.
The details of the harassment and the arrests on Tuesday of five teenagers brought reporters and cameras; the ugliness seemed consistent with a number of other suspected anti-Muslim attacks around the country amid an emotional and often-bitter public discussion about whether an Islamic community center should be built in New York City near the site of the World Trade Center.
The events here have left the congregants of the mosque — which practices a form of Islam that emphasizes simple living, prayer and meditation — searching for answers about why the periodic harassment persists.
Muhyiddin Shakoor, 66, a psychotherapist and retired professor at the State University at Brockport, who is one of the founders of the mosque, which is known as the World Sufi Foundation, said trouble seemed to ebb and flow with the national mood but appeared to have grown more mean-spirited in recent years. “It seems whatever is happening for Muslims generally gets projected on us,” he said.
But the events in this county, population 44,000, also suggest how hard it can be to accurately trace the influence of national debates and moods on individual episodes of antagonism.
Mr. Cardone, the district attorney, said he believed the mosque attacks were more an example of ignorance and teenage thrill-seeking than of any specific anti-Muslim fervor. He said, by way of example, that for years a fable had persisted about the mosque, which bears no sign except for the single word “Him” in Arabic calligraphy on its white-clapboard siding: that it is not a mosque at all, but a cult house where mysterious practices occur.
“Me and a couple of friends were going to a friend’s house,” Anthony Ogden, 18, one of the teenagers arrested, said Wednesday, “and we went down that road where the supposed mosque is, beeping the horn, trying to get them to chase us. We were looking for fun, you know, the wrong kind of fun.”
Mr. Ogden, who is going into the 10th grade but is very likely not returning to high school this year, said he had heard it was a cult house where people drank blood. “How many real religious places do you see that do not have a sign stating that it’s a religious place?” he asked.
For the mosque’s members, who are largely American-born professionals, some of whom converted from Judaism and Christianity, the harassment has been a painful invasion of their faith, said Bilal Huzair, 39, one of the group’s imams. “I don’t believe at all that they didn’t know what they were doing,” he said, adding that the harassers shouted anti-Muslim slogans as they drove by.
Each night during the month-long observance of Ramadan, the congregation has gathered for the traditional night prayer in the sanctuary, its single bulb a pinpoint of light under a dark sky filled with stars.
Several times each week, congregants said, the prayer was disrupted by the sound of screeching wheels and cursing, as one or two cars raced back and forth on the gravel road outside.
The congregants became more frightened after the shooting, and when cars appeared on Monday night, they were determined to get their license-plate numbers, because the police had told them not much could be done without that information, said Jacob Zimmerman, a congregant.
They went outside with flashlights as the prayer ended. David E. Bell, the son of a local physician, was struck by one of the cars as he stood on the side of the road. He said it intentionally swerved to hit him; Mr. Ogden, who said he was a passenger in the car, said Mr. Bell had something in his hand that struck the car, a Chevrolet Blazer, breaking its driver-side mirror.
The cars sped away about two miles to a local boat launch, a gravel area surrounded by a low metal guard rail. The teenagers were spotted there by Chad Scott, 35, a Ph.D. student and former Marine who was on his way to the mosque, late for prayers. Mr. Scott said he recognized the cars as the ones that had harassed the mosque on Friday.
He called the police and then returned to the boat launch with mosque members in three cars, hoping to hold the occupants there until officers came. Mr. Ogden said that he and another teenager, Mark Vendetti, 17, got out and started apologizing. Mr. Ogden said he was bruised as a mosque member briefly restrained him there.
Mr. Vendetti, who is accused of firing the shotgun outside the mosque, began talking to Mr. Scott and seemed to warm up to him, surprised that Mr. Scott was a former Marine.
“ ‘I’m a good Christian kid; I go to church every Sunday,’ ” Mr. Scott said Mr. Vendetti told him, adding that two of his brothers were also in the military.
But in the car that allegedly hit Mr. Bell, there was panic. Dylan Phillips, 18, drove around wildly, Mr. Huzair said, at one point nearly striking Mr. Bell, who was there with a tree branch he had brought from the mosque.
One of the teenagers also called the police. Mr. Bell, who said he was defending himself, shattered the back window of the car as it sped past. The teenagers interpreted that as aggression.
When the police arrived, they first interviewed the teenagers, who said they believed the congregants had billy clubs and swords. Instead of flashlights coming down the hill from the mosque, Mr. Ogden said, they saw “some kind of strobe.”
Mr. Vendetti faces the most serious charge: weapons possession, a felony. All the teenagers — Mr. Vendetti, Mr. Ogden, Mr. Phillips, Tim Weader and Jeff Donahue — are charged with disrupting a religious service, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail. Mr. Cardone is considering additional charges, like hit-and-run and possibly a hate crime. He said he thought that at least some of the teenagers knew that Muslims worshiped there and that they had referred to Islam in their epithets.
Mr. Huzair said he was not sure of the mosque’s next step. Press conferences and events intended to educate residents seemed a stretch for an institution so simple that it has never installed heat or a restroom. “We want to end Ramadan in peace,” he said. (It ends next weekend.)
From Mr. Cardone’s perspective, it is not the job of the mosque to educate the public, adding that its members have been cooperative, law-abiding citizens through the 20 years he had been district attorney.
“They have no understanding of the gravity and sensitivity of this thing,” he said of the teenagers, adding that even so, they would be responsible for the seriousness of their actions.
Along with better education from schools and parents, he said, “part of this is law-enforcement letting people know this is not going to be tolerated.”
One bright October morning, Fabiano Calleia, a researcher with the Federal University of Amazonas, was out in the lowland rainforest of Manaus, Brazil, tracking his usual group of eight pied tamarins as the small, dark monkeys with their dapper white shrugs grazed on the fruits of a fig tree. Suddenly the breakfast calm was shattered by the distinctive sound of a baby tamarin’s cry — a series of short, sharp whistles, like a boiling teapot doing Morse code.
A male tamarin clambered up and down the tree, vainly trying to locate the sound’s source. The calling continued. More monkeys became riled.
And then Dr. Calleia saw, to his astonishment, that the cries weren’t coming from a tamarin pup, but rather from a margay, an ocelotlike cat with large eyes, large paws and a large appetite for monkey meat.
The margay was slinking through some nearby vines, simulating simian sounds nonstop as it headed the tamarins’ way. The spotted cat leaped, a sentinel monkey screamed and the entire troop escaped unharmed.
On returning to camp, Dr. Calleia related the event to Fabio Rohe, the program manager for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Amazon program, who immediately thought of what the local inhabitants had told him: that margays and other jungle cats will sometimes hunt by mimicking the vocalizations of their prey.
“I said, this is comparable to monkeys using tools! Let’s write something,” Dr. Rohe recalled in an e-mail interview. “And we started writing in a few days!”
The scientists published their description of the first official “field observation of margay mimicking behavior” in the journal Neotropical Primates last year, but only now is it circulating among field researchers more widely.
The report is just one of a host of recent discoveries of priceless phonies, cases of mimicry from unexpected quarters that, really, by now we should have learned to expect, and that trump in sheer entertainment value the originals on which they are based. Imitation can be the sincerest form of flattery, the severest form of battery or the weirdest survival strategy, and if you think there’s nothing new under the sun, you’re right, but so what: playing copycat turns out to be nature’s perpetual novelty machine.
For example, scientists recently discovered that in some ant species, the queen is a consummate percussionist, equipped with a tiny, uniquely ridged organ for stridulating out royal fanfares that help keep her workers in line. Who knew that the queen was such a squeezebox? Her freeloaders sure did. The scientists also discovered parasitic butterfly larvae in the colony that use their abdominal muscles or other body parts to precisely imitate the queen’s stridulations, an act of musical piracy that induces worker ants to flutter and fuss and regurgitate food right into the parasites’ mouths.
Baby German cockroaches of both sexes have been found to mimic the smell and feel of adult female cockroaches, the better to dupe adult males into spreading their wings and exposing the hidden pantries beneath — pools of beery maltose sugar, proteins and fats. The males synthesize the expensive secretions as a courtship gift to woo mates, but cockroach nymphs, with their unslakable sweet mandible, have evolved the chemical and textural means to vamp. A gentle tap of a segmented antenna infused with a knockoff version of femme fertile perfume, and the male says, go ahead, hop aboard, eat the flirt off my back.
Within-species mimicry is generally rare in nature, said Coby Schal, a professor of entomology at North Carolina State University, who recently reported with his colleagues in Animal Behaviour on the gambit they dubbed jail baiting. Then again, he added, “humans have provided cockroaches with the sort of artificial ecologies that generate really unusual behaviors.” An unpredictable food supply, scant access to soil and the essential nitrogen it holds: no wonder young roaches must know how to scam.
Perhaps the most remarkable case of mimicry to come to light lately is that of the mimic octopus of Indonesia, with so many shape-shifting, shade-changing tricks at its disposal even eight sleeves cannot hold them. A report published this month in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society presents the evolutionary backstory to Thaumoctopus mimicus, a marine mollusk that was discovered and described only in the last dozen years. Like most octopuses, T. mimicus can use its nervous system to instantly change colors into a perfect wallpaper blend. Unlike most other octopuses, the mimic will sometimes choose to make itself more conspicuous to potential predators, rather than less. If it must venture out to forage in dangerous open waters, it assumes a menacing disguise appropriate to context. Before swimming above the seafloor, the octopus gives a shudder, and presto, its flesh becomes boldly striped, its arms and body resolve into a leafy, spiny form: it’s a toxic lionfish. For skating along the sea bottom, the octopus turns its skin bumpy and beige, compresses its body, pulls its limbs to its side: it’s a toxic flatfish, undulating its fins, staring you down with its top-sided eyes.
“When it’s being pestered by a damselfish, it will turn one of its arms into a sea snake, with the contrasting banding pattern of a sea snake, and with the tip of the arm thickened to look like the snake’s head,” said Healy Hamilton, a biodiversity and informatics expert at the California Academy of Sciences and an author on the report. “Sea snakes are voracious predators of damselfish.”
None of the octopus’s imitations are perfect, and they don’t need to be. “If the predator just takes pause,” said Dr. Healy, “the octopus can ink and jet propulse away.”
We humans also like our mimicry in small, imperfect doses. Nobody wants to be blatantly mocked or pyramid scammed, and bashing mimes, like hating clowns, is a remarkably popular sport. Yet psychologists are coming to appreciate the profound importance of nonconscious mimicry in making us feel loved and appreciated, or simply smoothing the edges of our everyday affairs. Without realizing it, when we’re conversing with friends, we match our tone of voice and speech rhythms to theirs, adopt similar body posture and even imitate their tics. Studies have shown that, when students are instructed to work cooperatively with somebody who engages in either repeated hair touching or foot shaking, the students soon start fiddling with their hair or waggling a foot. Waiters who repeat their customers’ orders word for word, or who subtly mimic a customer’s body language, earn higher tips than do waiters who paraphrase the order or forgo the gestural mirroring.
Rick van Baaren’s laboratory at Radboud University in the Netherlands recently determined that, in subjects who were forced to socialize with somebody who had been instructed to avoid all forms of verbal and behavioral mimicry, cortisol levels shot up, and it took repeated normal, mimetic exchanges to bring their stress hormones back down.
“I think the negative effect of not being imitated is even stronger than the positive effect of being imitated,” said Dr. van Baaren.
Unless you’re a margay trying to make a monkey out of me.
In a New Role, Teachers Move to Run Schools
Shortly after landing at Malcolm X Shabazz High School as a Teach for America recruit, Dominique D. Lee grew disgusted with a system that produced ninth graders who could not name the seven continents or the governor of their state. He started wondering: What if I were in charge?
Three years later, Mr. Lee, at just 25, is getting a chance to find out. Today, Mr. Lee and five other teachers — all veterans of Teach for America, a corps of college graduates who undergo five weeks of training and make a two-year commitment to teaching — are running a public school here with 650 children from kindergarten through eighth grade.
As the doors opened on Thursday at Brick Avon Academy, they welcomed students not as novice teachers following orders from the central office, but as “teacher-leaders.”
“This is a fantasy,” Mr. Lee said. “It’s six passionate people who came together and said, ‘Enough is enough.’ We’re just tired of seeing failure.”
The Newark teachers are part of a growing experiment around the country to allow teachers to step up from the classroom and lead efforts to turn around struggling urban school systems. Brick Avon is one of the first teacher-run schools in the New York region, joining a charter school in Brooklyn started in 2005 by the United Federation of Teachers.
Others have opened in Boston, Denver, Detroit and Los Angeles.
At Brick Avon, the principal, Charity Haygood, who calls herself the “principal teacher,” teaches every day, as do the two vice principals; Ms. Haygood started her career in Teach for America and eventually became vice principal for five years at another school.
While they are in charge of disciplining and evaluating staff members, they plan to defer all decisions about curriculum, policies, hiring and the budget to a governance committee made up largely of teachers elected by colleagues.
The school has 38 teachers, including Mr. Lee, Ms. Haygood and the other four Teach for America veterans who took it over.
Teachers have more say over what they teach, and starting next year they will have more time to work with children when they introduce a longer day.
To an unusual degree, they are shown they matter, as with the air fresheners left in the faculty lounge and bathrooms, or the new air-conditioner that will be raffled off at the end of the month to a teacher with perfect attendance.
Driving the establishment of teacher-run schools is the idea that teachers who have a sense of ownership of their schools will be happier and more motivated.
But some educators and parents question whether such schools are the solution for urban districts, which typically have large concentrations of poor students and struggle with low test scores and discipline problems.
They say that most teachers have neither the time nor the expertise to deal with the inner workings of a school, like paying bills, conducting fire drills and refereeing faculty disputes.
“Ever try to plan a vacation with a large extended family? That’s what it’s going to be like,” said Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy group in Washington. “It’s a good idea in theory, but there are just a handful of teachers who can pull it off.”
On the steps of Brick Avon last week, Lisa James, 26, a home health aide with a daughter in second grade, said she worried that teachers doubling as administrators would lose their focus.
“Teachers should be teachers,” she said.
Teacher-run schools are spreading as many districts seek new ways to raise student achievement and compete more effectively against charter schools.
This year, Los Angeles has turned over 29 city schools to groups of local teachers who worked with parents, administrators and union leaders to beat out established charter operators like Green Dot Public Schools.
Detroit is opening an elementary school without a principal; its motto is “Where teachers lead, children succeed.”
Another school with no principal was started last year by the Boston Teachers Union, with teachers ordering supplies, giving feedback to one another and deciding whose hours to reduce to save money.
“It’s really a collaborative environment,” said Betsy Drinan, 57, a teacher-leader at the Boston school. “I haven’t worked in schools before where they come to you and say ‘What do you want’ and ‘What do you need?’ ”
While teacher-run schools started as early as the mid-1990s, most had fewer than 350 students or were charter schools, including some teacher-owned cooperatives in Minnesota.
Tim McDonald, an associate with Education Evolving, a policy group in St. Paul that supports teacher-led schools, said studies showed that when teachers were given control — much like doctors or lawyers running their own practices — schools had higher morale, less turnover, more efficient decision-making and greater motivation to improve.
Still, Mr. McDonald was skeptical that a truly collaborative model could succeed widely in school districts, unless it was somehow freed from the traditional bureaucracy.
“You’re trying to run an upside-down pyramid in a pyramid structure,” he said. “There is so much momentum against being completely different in most districts.”
James H. Lytle, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania who teaches a course on urban school reform to Teach for America teachers, said the test of school leaders was whether they could make a school work smoothly.
Teachers, he said, “want the textbooks to be there and the students to come on time.”
“The question is whether teachers have the patience to do the ‘adminis-trivia,’ ” said Dr. Lytle, a former principal and superintendent in Philadelphia and Trenton.
The union-run UFT Charter School in East New York, Brooklyn, has run into problems. Two principals resigned after clashing with teachers, and recent test scores have been disappointing; only 22 percent of last year’s eighth graders passed state tests in English and 13 percent in math, compared with citywide rates of 37.5 percent in English and 46.3 percent in math.
Here in Newark, Mr. Lee and his partners — Ms. Haygood; Chris Perpich, who is one of the vice principals; Bernadette Scott; Princess Williams; and Mindy Weidman — worked at night and on weekends for 18 months to develop the blueprint for Brick, which is an acronym for Building Responsible Intelligent Creative Kids.
The school has a global focus, with plans to seek approval as an International Baccalaureate school and to require Mandarin as well as Spanish.
The group asked Newark district officials for a school to run in the South Ward, a poor, crime-ridden section of the city, because, as Mr. Lee put it, “you go where the need is greatest.”
They were given the former Avon Avenue School. In 2009, only 38 percent of Avon’s eighth graders passed state tests in language arts and 14 percent in math, compared with 82.5 percent and 71.8 percent statewide.
Mr. Lee, soft-spoken and unflappable, raced through the school last week, handing out class lists to teachers, security guards, even a surprised custodian. Later, he was wiping down cafeteria tables for lunch.
“It has to get done, so teachers can focus on teaching,” said Mr. Lee, who serves as Brick Avon’s operations manager as well as executive director of Brick, but also will be teaching in the school.
The teachers are raising money — $125,000 so far — to pay for extras like teacher training and an after-school program for students. They have tried to build good will in the community by holding a barbecue in the schoolyard, stopping by block parties and knocking on families’ doors.
The day before classes started, Ms. Haygood, the principal, stood before the other 37 teachers in the auditorium, two-thirds of whom had previously taught at Avon. She read from the book “If You Don’t Feed the Teachers, They Eat the Students.”
Then she shared her vision of a collaborative teacher-run school and asked them to demonstrate how they planned to take charge. Those without enough enthusiasm, she joked, would be required to get Brick tattooed on their backs.
Some teachers sashayed across the floor, while others cheered B-R-I-C-K. A group that included the music teacher broke into song. One teacher even slid into a split.
Afterward, Ms. Haygood asked them to jot down their feelings about the coming year.
Ed Crisafulli, 57, a science teacher working for his eighth principal at Avon, wrote down “hopeful” and then “finally.”
“We finally have someone who is a teacher,” he said, “someone who understands teachers from the smallest little thing to the biggest.”
A Ramadan Drumbeat Is Sounded in Queens
It was just past 4 the other morning when Mohammad Boota pulled his Lincoln Town Car into a service station on an industrial stretch in Long Island City, Queens, and bounded out — a typhoon of embroidered fabric, good cheer and unusual urgency.
“I’m late today,” he explained as he popped the car trunk, hauled out a barrel drum, grabbed two rough-hewn wooden sticks and, as a few bewildered mechanics watched, pounded out a galloping rhythm. The clamor echoed off a nearby hotel.
Mr. Boota, a limousine driver, has built a sideline as a ceremonial drummer for his fellow Pakistani immigrants. He is also New York City’s foremost — and perhaps only — Ramadan drummer. A few hours before dawn during the holy month of Ramadan, drummers throughout the Muslim world take to the streets to wake the faithful in time for a meal before the daytime fast.
Mr. Boota, 54, introduced the ritual to the darkened streets of Brooklyn about eight years ago. But after his drumming roused a spate of noise complaints, he restricted himself to a few blocks along Coney Island Avenue, where many Muslims live. This year, however, he has decided to push back — gently. Ramadan began on Aug. 11 and ends on Thursday, and on this recent morning Mr. Boota was taking the tradition farther afield, pioneering new drumming territory in Queens.
His plan was cautious. He intended to play only in front of Pakistani-owned businesses — gas stations, corner stores, restaurants — and never as loudly as he might were he in, say, Islamabad or Karachi.
“I’m not going to play where people have a problem,” he said, wearing a shimmering orange shalwar kameez — a traditional two-piece outfit — and a matching turban. “We, the Muslim people, already have so many issues.”
“I want people happy, dancing, eating,” he added. “I want to keep everybody happy.”
He was responding to demand, he explained. Since The New York Times published an article about him last year, Pakistanis and other Muslims have asked him to come play on their blocks.
“They say, ‘Why don’t you come to our place, too?’ ” said Mr. Boota, who immigrated in 1992 and lives with his wife and eight children in Coney Island. “They want me. Everybody happy!”
But now time was of the essence: Only about half an hour remained before everyone would already be up and heading to morning prayer. In the history of Ramadan, countless drummers have been stayed from their rounds by war, flood and pestilence, but probably none by early-morning tie-ups on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.
As Mr. Boota hammered at his drum in the service station, a Pakistani mechanic whooped, pulled out a cellphone and began dancing a jerky, head-wobbling two-step, holding his phone aloft, relaying the performance to a friend at the other end of the line.
Less than a minute later, however, Mr. Boota abruptly stopped. “Ready to go?” he asked, before jumping into his car.
Several blocks north, he pulled into another service station, Punjab Auto Repair, also Pakistani-owned. Same drill.
As he plastered the walls of the mechanic’s bay with percussive sound, Imran, the manager, said Mr. Boota was maintaining an important custom, even if its usefulness had been eclipsed long ago by the alarm clock.
“It’s Pakistani culture,” said Imran, who gave only his first name. Then he nodded at Mr. Boota. “He’s a very famous guy,” he said, proudly.
Suddenly, Mr. Boota was back in his car. “Thank you, mister,” he called out the window to a mechanic. “God bless you, Monday-to-Friday guy!” And in short order, he had driven several more blocks north, played inside a nearly empty Pakistani restaurant in Astoria, and was barreling southeast on the B.Q.E. toward Jackson Heights.
Even though the debate over a planned Islamic center near ground zero has made some Muslims in New York fearful of calling attention to themselves, Mr. Boota never considered suspending his street drumming.
“This is America — America has a Constitution, freedom of religion,” he said. “We’re not doing anything wrong.” He blamed politicians for inflaming the issue. “The political people are just trying to make the big smoke,” he said.
Arriving in Jackson Heights, he parked on Broadway, where two large Pakistani restaurants face each other from opposite sides of the street. Except for two men drinking coffee on the sidewalk, the block was empty. Mr. Boota shattered the quiet.
“What is this?” one man asked. “Is this somebody’s birthday?”
Several others came to the windows of Gourmet Sweets and Restaurant. The owner teased him about arriving so late.
“Time is gone,” Mr. Boota sighed, stepping inside the restaurant and playing briefly.
“It’s like my big family,” he said, then sat down for a cup of tea.
Bedbugs? Other Strange Invaders Threaten Much Wider Damage
You have perhaps heard about the bugs. In fact, it’s hard to turn on the television or read a newspaper without hearing more about bedbugs. In your mattress, at the office, the theater, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, the Empire State Building — from New York to Portland, it’s the summer’s It bug.
But at the Cornell University Agroforestry Resource Center in the Catskills, they are more concerned with a less celebrated bug, the emerald ash borer. Native to China, it was first detected in the United States in Michigan in 2002 — perhaps arriving in packing material with shipments to auto plants. Since then it has spread across the upper Midwest and into Canada, killing tens of millions of ash trees. It was first reported in New York in June 2009 in Cattaraugus County in southwestern New York.
This June it was discovered in Ulster and Greene Counties in the Catskills, including in the Catskill Forest Preserve. The larvae of the ash borer, a beetle with metallic green wing covers, burrow into tree bark, killing the tree in one to three years. There is no known systemic way to stop its spread or to save infested trees.
Entomologists say the bug, smaller than a penny, has the potential to kill off the 900 million ash trees in New York and the 7 billion ash trees in North America, driving the ash to extinction in a way that would surpass the damage that all but killed off the American chestnut and the elm.
“I’ve been a forest entomologist for 30 years, and I had no idea anything as bad as this could ever happen,” Mark C. Whitmore, an expert on the ash borer at Cornell, said. “The only worse thing would be the spread of the Asian longhorn beetle.”
As metaphor, the tale of two bugs, bedbug and ash borer, is perhaps too pat but is still true: Under our nose or in our bed, any pest is a huge pest, even one that causes serious annoyance but doesn’t carry disease. For those far away, out of sight, we’ll wait until disaster stares us in the face before we pay attention.
Ash trees make up 7 percent of the trees in New York State and about 10 percent of the hardwoods. Losing the ash trees, which are strong and elastic, and are used for, among other things, bows, tool handles and baseball bats, would have enormous economic costs. Beyond industrial and forestry losses, one of the biggest costs would be to individuals and municipalities that would have to cut down brittle, dead trees by the millions to avoid the danger of falling, damaged limbs.
Beyond that, the cost to the health and diversity of the forests and ecosystems that depend on them can only be guessed at.
“Nobody knows how it’s going to impact the overall function and composition of the forest,” said Marilyn Wyman of Cornell Cooperative Extension, who is working to educate people in the Catskills about the emerald ash borer. “You can’t continue to take pieces out of the system and not have something happen.”
FOR now, she and others are desperately trying to spread the word that the best way to slow the infestation’s spread is to not move firewood. The bugs fly, but it is believed that their rapid spread from the far western part of New York to the Catskills came in untreated wood used at campsites. Since 2008, it has been illegal to bring into the state or transport for more than 50 miles untreated wood that has not been kiln-dried to meet state standards.
The ash borer is only one among dozens of types of invasive plants, animals, insects and pathogens in New York alone that reflect the way human activity, usually unwitting, is altering the environment. Most recently, an invasive Asian clam, Corbicula fluminea, blamed for algal blooms that clouded Lake Tahoe, has been found in Lake George.
And the disruptions to the environment go well beyond invasive creatures, like the dire reports this summer of drastic declines, probably because of higher temperatures, in the ocean phytoplanktonthat support much of the life on earth. Weather is not climate, but in this hottest summer ever recorded in New York, in the earth’s hottest decade ever measured, one historically torrid year after another, it gets increasingly difficult to credibly refute the notion that human behavior is affecting the earth’s climate, just as it is affecting those forests, lakes and trees.
Still, on a lovely final weekend of summer, with Hurricane Earl blundering out to sea and with no shortage of ways to amuse, distract and entertain ourselves, it is easy to worry about what’s in our bed and ignore what’s in our future.
From the Other Side of Ground Zero, Anti-Muslim Venom
The Internet evangelist Bill Keller moved toward the dais in tiny, quick steps on Sunday, exhibiting the anticipation of a man ready to address a crowd. Roughly 60 people stood before him in a hotel meeting room in Lower Manhattan, temporary quarters of his Christian center, his response to the mosque planned for an empty building nearby.
“If we’re going to do something in New York City, we’re going to do something that’s not just bold and visible, but something that has a lasting presence,” said Mr. Keller, who is from the Tampa Bay area of Florida.
Later, he told reporters that Muslims “can go to their mosque and preach the lies of Islam and I’ll come here to preach the truth of the Gospel.”
Since its organizers attended a community board meeting four months ago, the mosque — part of a Muslim community center that would offer a day care center, an auditorium and a pool — quickly became fodder for a national debate. Much of the opposition is over its location: two blocks north of ground zero.
Mr. Keller promoted his center, which he called the 9/11 Christian Center at Ground Zero, as a religious counterweight to the mosque, which he repeatedly called a “victory mosque” or a monument to “a great Muslim military accomplishment,” as he explained it at the inaugural service at the New York Marriott Downtown Hotel on West Street, two blocks south of ground zero.
His career arc makes him a somewhat unusual standard-bearer: Mr. Keller became a preacher after serving a sentence in federal prison for insider trading, as he says in a biography posted on his Web site.
He has also appeared on Howard Stern’s satellite radio show and once had a program on national television, which was canceled after he called Islam a “1,400-year-old lie from the pits of hell.” The program is now carried by a small station in Florida.
But it is on the Internet that Mr. Keller has assembled his largest following. He claims that 20,000 people visit his Web site daily and 2.5 million receive his daily sermon by e-mail.
His service at the Marriott brought together people who expressed admiration, disapproval and curiosity. A man yelled, “Muslims pray five times a day,” but Mr. Keller carried on undisturbed, denouncing Islam as a religion that preaches “hate, violence and death.” The man eventually left.
Mr. Keller also described the conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck, who is a Mormon, and Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam who is behind the Muslim community center, as followers of false faiths. Later, he called the mosque’s potential worshipers guilty of terrorism by association, saying it was “their Muslim brothers” who “flew airplanes into the World Trade Center towers and killed 3,000 people.”
A woman who said she had driven in from Scranton, Pa., pulled Mr. Keller aside afterward and told him that his Christian center “needs to be here,” but she asked if he could tame his language so he would not come across as such a firebrand. He told her he had to talk exactly the way he did if he wanted people to follow him.
Prebem Andersen, 60, who lives in South Salem, N.Y., said Mr. Keller had “told the truth from a Christian perspective.” Richard Borkowski, who lives in Manhattan on the West Side, wore a black T-shirt with the words “Peace Through Understanding.”
Mr. Keller plans to be at the hotel every Sunday until the end of the year and then move the center on Jan. 1 to a permanent spot, although he said he would not disclose its location until Oct. 1.
“I have three locations in contract, but I won’t say where because I don’t want people picketing outside and ruining the deal,” he said.
He is relying on donations to cover the costs of his weekly services, which total $7,000. He said he would need $1 million to run the center for its first year from its permanent home, which would be open seven days a week. He did not seem concerned about finding the money.
“There are a lot more people than you’d imagine who believe in what I’m doing,” he said.
American Muslims Ask, Will We Ever Belong?
For nine years after the attacks of Sept. 11, many American Muslims made concerted efforts to build relationships with non-Muslims, to make it clear they abhor terrorism, to educate people about Islam and to participate in interfaith service projects. They took satisfaction in the observations by many scholars that Muslims in America were more successful and assimilated than Muslims in Europe.
Now, many of those same Muslims say that all of those years of work are being rapidly undone by the fierce opposition to a Muslim cultural center near ground zero that has unleashed a torrent of anti-Muslim sentiments and a spate of vandalism. The knifing of a Muslim cab driver in New York City has also alarmed many American Muslims.
“We worry: Will we ever be really completely accepted in American society?” said Dr. Ferhan Asghar, an orthopedic spine surgeon in Cincinnati and the father of two young girls. “In no other country could we have such freedoms — that’s why so many Muslims choose to make this country their own. But we do wonder whether it will get to the point where people don’t want Muslims here anymore.”
Eboo Patel, a founder and director of Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based community service program that tries to reduce religious conflict, said, “I am more scared than I’ve ever been — more scared than I was after Sept. 11.”
That was a refrain echoed by many American Muslims in interviews last week. They said they were scared not as much for their safety as to learn that the suspicion, ignorance and even hatred of Muslims is so widespread. This is not the trajectory toward integration and acceptance that Muslims thought they were on.
Some American Muslims said they were especially on edge as the anniversary of 9/11 approaches. The pastor of a small church in Florida has promised to burn a pile of Korans that day. Muslim leaders are telling their followers that the stunt has been widely condemned by Christian and other religious groups and should be ignored. But they said some young American Muslims were questioning how they could simply sit by and watch the promised desecration.
They liken their situation to that of other scapegoats in American history: Irish Roman Catholics before the nativist riots in the 1800s, the Japanese before they were put in internment camps during World War II.
Muslims sit in their living rooms, aghast as pundits assert over and over that Islam is not a religion at all but a political cult, that Muslims cannot be good Americans and that mosques are fronts for extremist jihadis. To address what it calls a “growing tide of fear and intolerance,” the Islamic Society of North America plans to convene a summit of Christian, Muslim and Jewish leaders in Washington on Tuesday.
Young American Muslims who are trying to figure out their place and their goals in life are particularly troubled, said Imam Abdullah T. Antepli, the Muslim chaplain at Duke University.
“People are discussing what is the alternative if we don’t belong here,” he said. “There are jokes: When are we moving to Canada, when are we moving to Sydney? Nobody will go anywhere, but there is hopelessness, there is helplessness, there is real grief.”
Mr. Antepli just returned from a trip last month with a rabbi and other American Muslim leaders to Poland and Germany, where they studied the Holocaust and the events that led up to it (the group issued a denunciation of Holocaust denial on its return).
“Some of what people are saying in this mosque controversy is very similar to what German media was saying about Jews in the 1920s and 1930s,” he said. “It’s really scary.”
American Muslims were anticipating a particularly joyful Ramadan this year. For the first time in decades, the monthlong holiday fell mostly during summer vacation, allowing children to stay up late each night for the celebratory iftar dinner, breaking the fast, with family and friends.
But the season turned sour.
The great mosque debate seems to have unleashed a flurry of vandalism and harassment directed at mosques: construction equipment set afire at a mosque site in Murfreesboro, Tenn; a plastic pig with graffiti thrown into a mosque in Madera, Calif.; teenagers shooting outside a mosque in upstate New York during Ramadan prayers. It is too soon to tell whether hate crimes against Muslims are rising or are on pace with previous years, experts said. But it is possible that other episodes are going unreported right now.
“Victims are reluctant to go public with these kinds of hate incidents because they fear further harassment or attack,” said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “They’re hoping all this will just blow over.”
Some Muslims said their situation felt more precarious now — under a president who is perceived as not only friendly to Muslims but is wrongly believed by many Americans to be Muslim himself — than it was under President George W. Bush.
Mr. Patel explained, “After Sept. 11, we had a Republican president who had the confidence and trust of red America, who went to a mosque and said, ‘Islam means peace,’ and who said ‘Muslims are our neighbors and friends,’ and who distinguished between terrorism and Islam.”
Now, unlike Mr. Bush then, the politicians with sway in red state America are the ones whipping up fear and hatred of Muslims, Mr. Patel said.
“There is simply the desire to paint an entire religion as the enemy,” he said. Referring to Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the founder of the proposed Muslim center near ground zero, “What they did to Imam Feisal was highly strategic. The signal was, we can Swift Boat your most moderate leaders.”
Several American Muslims said in interviews that they were stunned that what provoked the anti-Muslim backlash was not even another terrorist attack but a plan by an imam known for his work with leaders of other faiths to build a Muslim community center.
This year, Sept. 11 coincides with the celebration of Eid, the finale to Ramadan, which usually lasts three days (most Muslims will begin observing Eid this year on Sept. 10). But Muslim leaders, in this climate, said they wanted to avoid appearing to be celebrating on the anniversary of 9/11. Several major Muslim organizations have urged mosques to use the day to participate in commemoration events and community service.
Ingrid Mattson, the president of the Islamic Society of North America, said many American Muslims were still hoping to salvage the spirit of Ramadan.
“In Ramadan, you’re really not supposed to be focused on yourself,” she said. “It’s about looking out for the suffering of other people. Somehow it feels bad to be so worried about our own situation and our own security, when it should be about empathy towards others.”
Zoning Law Aside, Mosque Projects Face Battles
In disputes over the construction and expansion of mosques in California, New York, Tennessee and elsewhere, supporters of the projects tend to invoke constitutional principles of religious freedom.
But to experts in land-use planning, the area of law that directly concerns the controversies scattered across the nation, the way to resolve such conflicts is in a more modern document than the Constitution. These fights are often all but moot, from a legal perspective at least, because of a federal law with an ungainly acronym.
“Every planner and zoning lawyer I’ve talked to about this is saying the same thing — Rluipa,” said Daniel Lauber, a past president of the American Planning Association.
The Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, whose initials are commonly pronounced Ruh-LOO-pa, was approved unanimously by Congress in 2000. Its chief sponsor was Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah.
The law sets a high bar for any government action that would impose zoning or other restrictions on a religious institution. Any such action must serve a “compelling government interest” while also being “the least restrictive means” of furthering that interest, the law says.
Despite the clear advantage that the law gives to religious institutions, disputes over the construction of mosques have emerged around the country.
In Murfreesboro, Tenn., an arson at the site of a mosque project has raised tensions. In Temecula, Calif., some mosque opponents brought dogs to a protest, thinking it would offend Muslims who believe the animals to be unclean. Backers withdrew the planned expansion of a mosque in Brentwood, Tenn., after critics raised their voices.
The opposition often reflects America’s complicated attitudes toward the Middle East, in which passions run high and even basic facts are treated as objects of contention. The conservative New English Review stated the fundamental question as “whether Islam is a religion or a political doctrine seeking domination with a thin veneer of religious practices.”
To some experts, opposition to construction of the mosque and community center near ground zero, especially by religious organizations, seems surprising.
“It is quite interesting that some of the current opponents of the mosque construction, specifically Jewish leaders and conservative Christians, were formerly quite ardent supporters of the religious freedom offered by the religious land use act,” said Scott L. Thumma, a sociology of religion professor at the Hartford Institute for Religion Research at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut.
The controversy does not split neatly along political lines. Some Democrats, including the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, have voiced concern over plans to build the Islamic center, while Republicans like Mr. Hatch insist that the government stick to the principles of religious liberty for which the law stands.
“Clearly, the proponents of the mosque have a legal and a constitutional right to build a house of worship on private property,” Mr. Hatch said in a statement, referring to the project in Manhattan.
Like Senator Reid and President Obama, however, Mr. Hatch noted that having a legal right to build the project did not necessarily mean that it was wise to do so.
“The question in this case is whether, given the inflamed passions of the community — including those of many people who lost family members on 9/11 — building the mosque at that location is a good idea,” he said.
Opponents of new mosque construction often cite factors other than religion, like parking and traffic, when houses of worship expand. But religion often remains part of the mix. In a statement on the mosque protest in Temecula, William Rench, the senior pastor of the nearby Calvary Baptist Church, said, “Our primary concern is that the land adjacent to our property is wholly inadequate and unsuited for the proposed 25,000-square-foot Islamic worship center.”
The rest of the statement concerns Islam itself. “It seems logical to me that we would be opposed to Islam based on its fundamental teachings and on documented stories of the terror that radical Islam promotes,” Mr. Rench wrote.
In an interview, Mr. Rench said that questions of national and local security should override land-use rules, though in the case of the mosque next door, “I don’t think they represent the more extreme elements of Islam.” Still, he added, “how are we going to get assurances that it’s never going to be an issue?”
Mahmoud Harmoush, the imam of the mosque, said that accusations of radicalism “really are not worth responding to,” and that despite the importance of Shariah, or Islamic law, to their faith, “we are bound by the law of the land,” just as someone who learns to drive in Britain must drive on the right side of the road in the United States.
No one knows what will happen in coming years or the next generation, Mr. Harmoush said, but “the future could be much better than Mr. Rench is imagining.” The mosque might, he said, for example, provide overflow parking for the church.
Patrick Richardson, the planning and development director for the City of Temecula, called the issue “very straightforward.”
“This is nothing related to politics or religion,” he said, “and the law basically precludes us from making that part of the decision-making process.”
The mosque will come up for its first public hearing in November, after the proponents complete a traffic study recommended by the city.
“I can’t say I’m surprised that there is controversy about this,” Mr. Richardson said. “I’m probably a little more disappointed than anything.”
In Willowbrook, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, plans for a mosque and community center have run into opposition that has focused locally on grounds of parking, traffic and water runoff. But anti-Muslim Web sites have tried to fold that opposition into the broader fight over Islam.
Dr. M. A. Hamadeh, a pulmonologist who is the president of the Muslim Educational and Cultural Center of America, which is building the mosque, said news of other conflicts around the country troubled him.
“This is the greatest country in the world, and the greatness is based in freedom — freedom of religion, freedom of association, and of separation between state and religion,” Dr. Hamadeh said. “In order to continue to be a great country, we have to continue to uphold these values.”
Accepted Notion of Mars as Lifeless Is Challenged
For all the triumph of NASA’s 1976 Viking mission, which put two unmanned spacecraft on Mars, there was one major disappointment: The landers failed to find carbon-based molecules that could serve as the building blocks of life.
The complete lack of these organic molecules was a surprise, and the notion of a desolate, lifeless Mars persisted for years.
Now, some scientists say that conclusion was premature and perhaps even incorrect. They suggest that such building blocks — known as organic molecules, although they need not come from living organisms — were indeed in the soil, but that they were inadvertently destroyed before they could be detected.
If true, that could cast the scientific conclusions of the Viking mission in a new light, especially since another Viking experiment claimed to have found living microbes in the soil. Most scientists discounted that possibility — how could there be life in soil devoid of the building blocks of life?
“That gospel of the Viking results has influenced our perspective on life of Mars for 35 years,” said Christopher McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California and an author of the new findings, to be published in The Journal of Geophysical Research — Planets. “What do they find? Nothing. But it turns out it was not really nothing.”
The Viking 1 and Viking 2 landers scooped Martian soil samples and heated them, looking for organic compounds in the released gases. It found only two — chloromethane and dichloromethane — and the scientists concluded that the chlorine compounds were contaminants from fluids used to clean the spacecraft.
Then in 2008, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander unexpectedly found a chlorine chemical, perchlorate, in the planet’s arctic soil.
In the new experiments, the scientists heated a mixture of perchlorate with soil from the Atacama Desert in Chile, often considered the closest thing on Earth to Mars. Chemical reactions destroyed organic compounds in the soil, producing mostly carbon dioxide and traces of chloromethane and dichloromethane, just like what the Viking landers had found.
“Now when we look back at the Viking results, it makes sense,” Dr. McKay said. “It was bizarre chemistry.”
For the veteran Mars researcher Gilbert V. Levin, the new paper offers a measure of vindication. His Viking experiment added nutrients to the soil and measured releases of radioactive gas, which would occur as microbes ate the food. Radioactive gas was released, but with the lack of organics in the soil, most concluded it had come from a nonbiological chemical reaction.
Rafael Navarro-González of the National Autonomous University of Mexico City and lead author of the new study, said the claim that Viking found life was still inconclusive. “It gives a big possibility,” he said, “but of course we don’t know.”
Dr. Levin acknowledged that nonbiological reactions could cause gas to be released, but said the Viking experiment showed that whatever was producing the gas did so at temperatures plausible for microbes but not for other explanations.
But the leader of the Viking organics experiment, Klaus Biemann, a retired professor at M.I.T., doubts the new interpretation. He noted that the experiment also detected freon, which was certainly a contaminant, and that the presence of perchlorate at the Viking sites, far from where the Phoenix landed, was speculation.
More definitive answers could come with the Mars Science Laboratory, scheduled to be launched next year and to arrive in 2012. It will carry an experiment that will be able to separate perchlorates from organic molecules and thus allow it to identify the organics without destroying them.
A Mosque Invisible to Many Is a Target
The small congregation established a mosque here three decades ago in a 19th-century farmhouse surrounded by apple orchards and cornfields. In the farmhouse’s simple prayer room, they prayed for many things, including peace and quiet that has never fully come.
The local sheriff said some in his county did not even know that the mosque was there. Nevertheless, over the years, burglars have stolen prayer rugs and religious tapestries from the small sanctuary, the only Islamic place of worship in rural Orleans County, which hugs the shore of Lake Ontario between Buffalo and Rochester. Vandals have shattered car windows and thrown beer bottles on the lawn. One night about five years ago, the wooden fence in front of the mosque was set afire.
And then, this week, a car filled with local teenagers sideswiped the 29-year-old son of one of the mosque’s founding members, said Joseph V. Cardone, the Orleans County district attorney. One teenager was charged with firing a shotgun into the air near the mosque a few days earlier, after driving by and shouting epithets.
The details of the harassment and the arrests on Tuesday of five teenagers brought reporters and cameras; the ugliness seemed consistent with a number of other suspected anti-Muslim attacks around the country amid an emotional and often-bitter public discussion about whether an Islamic community center should be built in New York City near the site of the World Trade Center.
The events here have left the congregants of the mosque — which practices a form of Islam that emphasizes simple living, prayer and meditation — searching for answers about why the periodic harassment persists.
Muhyiddin Shakoor, 66, a psychotherapist and retired professor at the State University at Brockport, who is one of the founders of the mosque, which is known as the World Sufi Foundation, said trouble seemed to ebb and flow with the national mood but appeared to have grown more mean-spirited in recent years. “It seems whatever is happening for Muslims generally gets projected on us,” he said.
But the events in this county, population 44,000, also suggest how hard it can be to accurately trace the influence of national debates and moods on individual episodes of antagonism.
Mr. Cardone, the district attorney, said he believed the mosque attacks were more an example of ignorance and teenage thrill-seeking than of any specific anti-Muslim fervor. He said, by way of example, that for years a fable had persisted about the mosque, which bears no sign except for the single word “Him” in Arabic calligraphy on its white-clapboard siding: that it is not a mosque at all, but a cult house where mysterious practices occur.
“Me and a couple of friends were going to a friend’s house,” Anthony Ogden, 18, one of the teenagers arrested, said Wednesday, “and we went down that road where the supposed mosque is, beeping the horn, trying to get them to chase us. We were looking for fun, you know, the wrong kind of fun.”
Mr. Ogden, who is going into the 10th grade but is very likely not returning to high school this year, said he had heard it was a cult house where people drank blood. “How many real religious places do you see that do not have a sign stating that it’s a religious place?” he asked.
For the mosque’s members, who are largely American-born professionals, some of whom converted from Judaism and Christianity, the harassment has been a painful invasion of their faith, said Bilal Huzair, 39, one of the group’s imams. “I don’t believe at all that they didn’t know what they were doing,” he said, adding that the harassers shouted anti-Muslim slogans as they drove by.
Each night during the month-long observance of Ramadan, the congregation has gathered for the traditional night prayer in the sanctuary, its single bulb a pinpoint of light under a dark sky filled with stars.
Several times each week, congregants said, the prayer was disrupted by the sound of screeching wheels and cursing, as one or two cars raced back and forth on the gravel road outside.
The congregants became more frightened after the shooting, and when cars appeared on Monday night, they were determined to get their license-plate numbers, because the police had told them not much could be done without that information, said Jacob Zimmerman, a congregant.
They went outside with flashlights as the prayer ended. David E. Bell, the son of a local physician, was struck by one of the cars as he stood on the side of the road. He said it intentionally swerved to hit him; Mr. Ogden, who said he was a passenger in the car, said Mr. Bell had something in his hand that struck the car, a Chevrolet Blazer, breaking its driver-side mirror.
The cars sped away about two miles to a local boat launch, a gravel area surrounded by a low metal guard rail. The teenagers were spotted there by Chad Scott, 35, a Ph.D. student and former Marine who was on his way to the mosque, late for prayers. Mr. Scott said he recognized the cars as the ones that had harassed the mosque on Friday.
He called the police and then returned to the boat launch with mosque members in three cars, hoping to hold the occupants there until officers came. Mr. Ogden said that he and another teenager, Mark Vendetti, 17, got out and started apologizing. Mr. Ogden said he was bruised as a mosque member briefly restrained him there.
Mr. Vendetti, who is accused of firing the shotgun outside the mosque, began talking to Mr. Scott and seemed to warm up to him, surprised that Mr. Scott was a former Marine.
“ ‘I’m a good Christian kid; I go to church every Sunday,’ ” Mr. Scott said Mr. Vendetti told him, adding that two of his brothers were also in the military.
But in the car that allegedly hit Mr. Bell, there was panic. Dylan Phillips, 18, drove around wildly, Mr. Huzair said, at one point nearly striking Mr. Bell, who was there with a tree branch he had brought from the mosque.
One of the teenagers also called the police. Mr. Bell, who said he was defending himself, shattered the back window of the car as it sped past. The teenagers interpreted that as aggression.
When the police arrived, they first interviewed the teenagers, who said they believed the congregants had billy clubs and swords. Instead of flashlights coming down the hill from the mosque, Mr. Ogden said, they saw “some kind of strobe.”
Mr. Vendetti faces the most serious charge: weapons possession, a felony. All the teenagers — Mr. Vendetti, Mr. Ogden, Mr. Phillips, Tim Weader and Jeff Donahue — are charged with disrupting a religious service, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail. Mr. Cardone is considering additional charges, like hit-and-run and possibly a hate crime. He said he thought that at least some of the teenagers knew that Muslims worshiped there and that they had referred to Islam in their epithets.
Mr. Huzair said he was not sure of the mosque’s next step. Press conferences and events intended to educate residents seemed a stretch for an institution so simple that it has never installed heat or a restroom. “We want to end Ramadan in peace,” he said. (It ends next weekend.)
From Mr. Cardone’s perspective, it is not the job of the mosque to educate the public, adding that its members have been cooperative, law-abiding citizens through the 20 years he had been district attorney.
“They have no understanding of the gravity and sensitivity of this thing,” he said of the teenagers, adding that even so, they would be responsible for the seriousness of their actions.
Along with better education from schools and parents, he said, “part of this is law-enforcement letting people know this is not going to be tolerated.”
