by ANDREA USEEM

After witnessing the World Trade Center attacks from his Wall Street Journal office in downtown Manhattan, reporter Paul Barrett said he realized how little he and other Americans knew about Islam in general and Islam in America in particular. After writing a series of articles for the paper, Barrett deepened his reporting, focusing on seven American Muslims. The result is American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion, which profiles Dearborn, Michigan, publisher Osama Siblani, scholar Khaled Abou El Fadl, Brooklyn imam Siraj Wahhaj, activist Asra Nomani, Sufi convert Abdul Kabir Krambo, Saudi graduate student Sami al-Hussayen and ex-Salafi Mustafa Saied.

Andrea Useem recently spoke with Paul Barrett about his new book, Muslims' split personalities and the future of American Muslim leadership

ANDREA USEEM: How did you select the seven people you profiled in the book?

PAUL BARRETT: The process was not at all scientific. I chose people whose stories I thought were not necessarily ordinary or typical but were suggestive of larger themes and would be provocative to readers, not in the sense of offending them, but in the sense of making them think.

Asra Nomani was the one woman you profiled, although she has already told her own story in her memoir, Standing Alone at Mecca. Why did you choose her?

It would be a fair criticism to say we've learned enough about Asra. My response would be, "Read the story. If you think it's redundant, mark me down a grade." But there can be a big difference between an outsider writing about a controversy, examining it from all sides, as opposed to the person who's in the middle of it, narrating their own story.

Your portrait of Nomani is not always flattering. She comes across in the chapter as a very contentious person.

It helps to view people in three dimensions. When you're describing a brave and courageous person, it doesn't do their cause any good to portray them as an absolute paragon of virtue. Why would a person turn their life upside down and throw themselves into conflict with practically everybody around them? The issues themselves help explain that, so does personality. Asra's personality and the choices she made seem to be valid aspects of the story to explore. I am, on balance, very admiring of her. But I am also prepared to accept that other people would read what I've written and say, "See, he shows all she wants to do is attract attention to herself." If you think everything she's doing boils down to that, so be it. I think it would be a very shortsighted approach to a very complicated person who deserves respectful attention even if you disagree with her or don't like the tactics she uses.

Until 9/11, some American Muslims justified suicide bombings in the context of the Palestinian cause. Yet when 9/11 happened, they had a heartfelt desire to condemn it. How will that tension be resolved? Is public scrutiny going to force American Muslims to come down on one side or another? Or will non-Muslim Americans have to accept that support for the Palestinian cause is a right of free speech?

You're getting to the heart of the difficulty that many, although certainly not all, Muslims will have in taking what might be seen as the final, big step into a zone where they feel entirely comfortable as Americans. I don't know exactly how that'll unfold. There are tentative ways to approach the questions that might make progress possible.

For example, imagine if more Muslims and non-Muslims - and in particular more Muslims and Jews - would be willing to take a deep breath and say, "We recognize we are at loggerheads on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, and yet we want to do the following three projects in our metropolitan area." I don't know what those projects are; you fill in the blanks. In other words, talk with people, work with people, have your kids play together, even though you know, as a Jew, that they support the Palestinians and even though you know, as a Muslim, that the Jews do not have sympathy with the Palestinians. Because we may not resolve that larger conflict in this lifetime.

People need a willingness to agree to disagree. Yes, there is a contained area where we hate each other, but we set it to one side, because 90 percent of our aspirations have to do with achievement, and college, and kids, et cetera. That's the way things are in this country, because it is not the borderline between Israel and the West Bank.

But there are some significant legal issues here, about what constitutes material support to a terrorist organiation. That comes out in your chapter on Sami al-Hussayen, who was charged with that crime. Certainly many Muslims were shocked to find their charitable donations frozen by the U.S. Treasury Department.

Muslims who live in the United States have to come to accept that if an organization is defined by our democratically elected government as a terrorist organization, then you've got to stop giving money to someone who you think is going to turn it over to that organization. That's getting down to brass tacks. I understand some American Muslims sympathize with aspects of Hamas and Hezbollah, though they don't necessarily sympathize with the suicide bombings, or the aspiration to sweep the Israelis into the sea and establish an Islamic state running from God knows where to God knows where. They sympathize with an organization that has given Israel a black eye from time to time. I have nothing nice to say about those organizations, but I understand why some people do. You can empathize with people you passionately disagree with. But American Muslims can't think they have a right to give money to Hezbollah. They have got to stop, and I think most of them have.

Having said that, the American government has to help Muslims figure out how to give to legitimate causes in the Middle East. I don't know how you get the money into the hands of people who are doing work that needs to be done. But that seems to be a legitimate complaint that Muslims have: "I want to give money toward my homeland or my co-religionists and I can't." The Treasury Department should help Muslims do that more readily.