NJ Muslim: From 9/11 Detainee Lawyer to Judge

As the rubble of ground zero smoldered in the months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the investigation was just as hot across the Hudson River in New Jersey.

More than 1,100 Arabs and Muslims — most of them from New York and northern New Jersey — were rounded up and detained as the FBI feverishly hunted for additional terrorists.

In few places was the spotlight as white-hot — and the fear among Muslims as deep — as in Paterson, where as many as six of the 9/11 hijackers lived or spent time in the weeks before the attacks. Agents were knocking on doors, asking questions about religious practices, finances and acquaintances, and many Muslims were cowering behind those doors, terrified of being thrown in jail for crimes they knew nothing about.

Into this maelstrom stepped a young, soft-spoken Muslim immigration attorney named Sohail Mohammed. He represented many people rounded up in New Jersey in the post-9/11 dragnet and quickly saw the vast chasm between the Muslim community and law enforcement. Along the way, he gained the respect and friendship of many top law enforcement officials for his efforts to build bridges between the two sides and help defuse tensions in those incredibly tense days. He won over one official whose favor would prove crucial nearly a decade later: the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Chris Christie.

Christie, now the state's governor, nominated Mohammed to a Superior Court judgeship in January. Mohammed was sworn into office last week, becoming New Jersey's second Muslim judge.

Christie, who has become a darling of Republicans, with party loyalists begging him to run for president, stuck with Mohammed despite a vicious campaign by conservative bloggers who denounced Christie and raised fears that Mohammed would introduce Islamic Sharia law into the courts.

"Sohail Mohammed is an extraordinary American who is an outstanding lawyer who played an integral role post-9/11 in building bridges between the Muslim community and law enforcement," Christie said. "I was there; I saw it.

"Sharia law has nothing to do with this. It's crazy," Christie said. "This Sharia law business is crap; it's crazy and I'm tired of dealing with crazies. I'm happy he's willing to serve after all this baloney."

Mohammed undertook several initiatives that eased the mistrust and increased understanding between both sides.

He and other leaders of New Jersey's Muslim community met with FBI and other law enforcement agencies to educate them on Islam and Muslim culture. He helped arrange a job fair at a mosque in which the FBI and other agencies recruited Muslims for law enforcement jobs.

When a group of young Muslims was detained by security guards at Giants Stadium for praying near an air intake vent during a game, Mohammed got the state's sports authority to provide a room where anyone of any faith could go to pray or just enjoy a few moments of quiet. He also pushed the U.S. Justice Department to provide a list of pre-approved charities to which Muslims could donate without fear of being suspected of terrorist ties — an endeavor that failed when the feds refused.

And when cable TV stations needed a "good Muslim" to interview, they called him.

Mohammed, now 47, says his religion has nothing to do with how he'll perform his new job.

"My faith, my ethnicity: that means nothing here," he said. "It's not an issue."

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The fallout from the terror attacks was quick and extreme in Paterson, home to the nation's second-largest Arab-American community after Dearborn, Mich. Carloads of people descended on the city's Arab quarter, screaming obscenities and occasionally throwing things at veiled women on the sidewalk. Some radio hosts broadcast — falsely — that Arabs were dancing in the streets and on rooftops when the twin towers fell.

Robert Passero, Passaic County's Superior Court assignment judge at the time, was feeling the pressure as well.

"They were recommending I close the courthouse because tempers were high," he said. "There were people from out of town riding through south Paterson making threats. It was very tense."

The veteran judge had known Mohammed for years, taking an interest in him after the young man sat through one of his cases as a juror, then implausibly called the judge's office the following week to say he loved jury duty so much he wanted to do it again. Seeing the makings of a future lawyer, the judge encouraged Mohammed to go to law school, then mentored him along the way, even as Mohammed started a solo practice concentrating on immigration law.

The judge was not surprised when one of the first voices offering help in defusing tensions was Mohammed.

"He was a huge help in that regard," Passero said. "People who knew him came to appreciate that he is a young man who had done a lot to help."

In June 2002, the FBI was still actively scouring New Jersey cities including Paterson for terrorists. Mohammed would get numerous calls each week from worried Muslims saying FBI agents had knocked on their doors and asked for personal information, including where they worshipped, the names of others who attended the mosque and whether they had ever declared bankruptcy.

"After 9/11 we wanted to forge a better relationship with the Muslim community, we wanted to understand them better, we wanted them to understand us better, explain our job, and that we are there to protect them, too," said Charles McKenna, an assistant U.S. attorney at the time and now head of New Jersey's Office of Homeland Security. "But we didn't have many entrees into that community. Through Sohail, we were able to go in and meet with a lot of the elders of the community. I think that community was a little afraid of the government at that time. A person with his gravitas gave us a foot in the door."

Those efforts led to a job fair at the mosque, the Islamic Center of Passaic County, where for three hours, representatives of the country's most powerful law enforcement agencies tried to get about 300 worshippers interested in working for the government. At the time, none of the more than 300 FBI agents assigned to New Jersey spoke Arabic.

No one that night was hired by the FBI, but several other law enforcement agencies did hire applicants from the mosque. Authorities considered the outreach effort a success.

Not long afterward, Mohammed and others offered to speak to law enforcement to explain Islam and Muslim culture — before agents fanned out to conduct interviews of hundreds of Arabs and Muslims as part of the terror investigation. Mohammed knew a little familiarity could prevent a misunderstanding that could land an innocent person in jail and waste investigators' precious time on a dead end.

For instance, he said, when a Muslim looks down while speaking to someone, that may be interpreted by law enforcement as evasiveness but is really a sign of respect. Likewise, it may not be unusual for a Muslim not to answer a knock at the door right away if he or she is engaged in daily prayer. The recommendation: Wait 10 minutes, then knock again.

By all accounts, the sessions went well. They eventually were expanded beyond the FBI to other agencies, including the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

"It was a tough crowd, but you have to have understanding," Mohammed recalled. "When you are ignorant about something or someone, that brings fear. If you get to know someone and more about them, you remove that fear and we can see people for who they are."

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Mohammed's work after 9/11 involved representing people in federal immigration court, most of whom were snared in the dragnet that followed the attacks. He began noticing a trend: The FBI was clearing suspects — or at least admitting it had lost interest in them as terror suspects — long before the courts dealt with their cases. As a result, many were languishing in county jails for months because the court system was overwhelmed with cases; about 1,200 detainees were picked up in the months following 9/11, many of them in New York and northern New Jersey.

One was a 19-year-old gas station attendant in Ocean County who shared the same name as Taliban leader Mohamed Omar. He came to the FBI's attention by accident, when customers recalled a co-worker at the station who bore a resemblance to 9/11 hijacker Marwan al-Shehhi and told the agency they remembered someone pumping gas who might have been one of the terrorists.

He wasn't, but the resulting attention led to Omar's detention on charges he had violated his tourist visa by working in the U.S. The FBI quickly cleared him, and in less than a week an immigration judge ordered him deported to his native Egypt. But he remained in custody for nearly four months, with Sohail Mohammed appearing repeatedly in court and inquiring about the delay.

In the course of his work, Mohammed won the trust of many law enforcement officials, including Christie, the newly minted U.S. attorney for New Jersey. When he began making his interest in a judgeship known a few years ago, Mohammed listed Christie as his first reference.

Mohammed said what ingratiated him to many in law enforcement is his willingness to consider an opposing viewpoint.

"Even when I was an attorney, I would tell my clients you have to look at this from the other side, too," he said. "There was a balancing test between civil liberties and national security. We need both. I think that's why I earned the respect of law enforcement because I always emphasized both. You are defending this country every time you are serving justice."

Christie said Mohammed was a willing partner in peace.

"When we reached out our hands, the person who most vigorously and most frequently grabbed it back was Sohail Mohammed," Christie said.

Nine years later, Christie nominated Mohammed for a judgeship. The tough-talking, crime-busting former federal prosecutor soon found himself accused on the Internet of cozying up to Islamic radicals — and Mohammed was accused of far worse. One of the kinder headlines: "Governor Christie's Dirty Islamist Ties."

Mohammed's confirmation hearing before the state Senate included two hours of questioning, some of which Christie described as "disgusting," including inquires about Sharia, the Islamic legal code, jihad and Hamas — questions few if any other state court judges have had to answer.

The current U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Paul Fishman, said those critics equated a Muslim-American's desire to serve his country to "an act of treachery."

"What is disturbing and revolting to me is the number of people who seem to believe that a Muslim has no place on the bench," he said. But proof to the contrary was all around during Mohammed's swearing-in ceremony.

"Sohail, take a good look around you," Fishman told him. "Look at who we are and why we are here — lawyers, judges, doctors, accountants, engineers, homemakers, police, prosecutors, Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, probably even a few atheists, Palestinians and Israelis, Yankee fans and Met fans. That we all came is a testament to you. Years from now it will not be so notable that a Muslim serves on the Superior Court, and no one will ask if a nominee will follow Sharia law instead of American law."