During Farhan Latif’s first week as president of Henry Ford College’s Muslim student association, terrorists hijacked four commercial flights and launched an assault on the United States in the name of Islam.
Overnight, Mr. Latif’s job as a young leader on the Detroit campus went from securing a place for Muslim students to pray to defending his peers from angry, and sometimes violent, reactions from fellow students.
Many of the college’s Jewish and Christian professors provided encouragement following the September 11, 2001, attacks. But he received little cooperation from Muslim community organizations. Loosely structured and supported on an ad hoc basis, many of the local groups lacked the leadership and vision necessary to help defuse the tension, Mr. Latif remembers.
“There was a lot of bridge-building work to be done,” he says, “but there wasn’t enough institutional support available.”
Now, 16 years later, as president of the El-Hibri Foundation, Mr. Latif is using lessons learned during his time as a student activist as he attempts to help build Muslim American civil society. The El-Hibri Foundation presents a case study in how one of the hundreds of Muslim organizations across the country is struggling to reset priorities following what many see as an abrupt and worrisome change in the political climate. Hate crimes against Muslims have risen sharply in recent years, according to FBI data, and schoolyard bullying is reportedly on the rise.
Mr. Latif prefers a measured response to current events, with a long-term focus on building relationships. He’d like to use the foundation’s $46 million in assets to encourage interfaith dialogue on campuses and in the media, help develop Muslim American nonprofit leaders, and increase civic participation among American Muslims.
“The foundation doesn’t react,” he says. “Some funders are focused on day-to-day crisis management. We just hope to keep our head down and focus on the work. It detracts from the work of long-term building when you’re constantly trying to put out fires.”
The Washington, D.C.-based foundation is working to build a new generation of Muslim American leaders, bring young people of different faiths together face-to-face, and serve as an expert source of information.
It detracts from the work of long-term building when you’re constantly trying to put out fires.
“The Muslim American civil society is still in a formative stage,” he says. “We are more process-based than outcome-based. It’s about helping people get a seat at the table versus what they’re going to say when they’re at the table.”
Telecom Fortune
The El-Hibri family created the philanthropy as a tribute to its patriarch, Ibrahim El-Hibri. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, Mr. El-Hibri built his fortune developing telecom networks internationally. In its early years, Mr. Latif said, the organization focused on building its basic infrastructure. In 2015, eight years after Mr. El-Hibri died, Mr. Latif was named president of the foundation. During his first year on the job, he suspended grant making and embarked on a series of information-gathering meetings with more than 300 nonprofit, religious, and academic leaders across the country. Mr. Latif said his goal was learning about the founder’s inspiration and “applying it to the context of today.”
When grants resume this spring, the foundation will focus on domestic projects, with the exception of maintaining support for Dar al-Aytam, a Lebanese orphanage — a special cause for Mr. El-Hibri, who was himself an orphan.
The foundation, which spends about $1.6 million on grants and programs each year, will work to strengthen Muslim American nonprofits and promote inclusion — both in terms of how Muslims are viewed by other Americans and how the Muslim community deals with racial and gender differences. El-Hibri will support groups that promote interfaith dialogue and present stories that put Muslim Americans in a positive light.
Its support of Unity Productions Foundation is an example of the latter approach. The nonprofit produces films that showcase peace and understanding as core Islamic values. It also consults with Hollywood producers about the need for more uplifting portrayals of Muslims.
Bewildering Change
According to a 2015 study conducted by YouGov, more than half of Americans have an unfavorable view of Muslims, and more than two-thirds do not have Muslim friends.
Mr. Latif wants people to recognize that Muslims are a fixture in American cultural and civic life. For example, thousands of Muslims serve in the armed forces and in police departments across the country.
The rise in Islamophobia in the United States over the past year has Mr. Latif bewildered.
“It’s a country that’s hard to recognize at some level,” says Mr. Latif, the son of a Pakistani foreign-service officer who became a U.S. citizen as a young adult. “I wish more people could hear stories about people like myself. We’re contributing to society and understand the privilege of living here.”
Training Students
On of El-Hibri’s grantees is the Interfaith Youth Core. Led by Eboo Patel, the group trains student leaders to engage in dialogue with students of different religions and has successfully pressed schools to adopt classes and minors in interfaith studies.
With the rise in Islamophobia in the United States over the past year, “it’s a country that’s hard to recognize at some level.”
Mr. Patel hopes that the leadership training and curriculum development will, over time, change attitudes about Muslims in America. He points to the work of the National Conference for Community and Justice as a model. Founded in 1927 as the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the group fought against the bigotry that surfaced when Al Smith, a Catholic, was the Democratic nominee for president.
“We think that the idea that America was a Judeo-Christian society was etched into Plymouth Rock, when in fact, anti-Catholic bigotry and anti-Semitism was a significant part of American life for a long period of time,” he says. “The NCCJ took a long view, and those prejudices were largely vanquished from mainstream America. This is a similar moment.”
Mr. Patel sees El-Hibri at the forefront of a new generation of Muslim charities that is starting to shed a more parochial view.
“El-Hibri is not about setting up mosques and places where people get married, as important as that is,” he says. “It’s an excellent example of the first wave of institutions inspired by Muslim identification and values whose primary purpose is to serve the broader society as opposed to the more narrow, insular needs of Muslims.”
Long Road
Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates, also sees a long road ahead. Founded by a group of Muslim lawyers, her group has tried to respond to events quickly by shedding light on hate crimes and instances of bigotry by public officials and providing legal counsel for Muslims who risked deportation under the Trump administration’s two successive executive orders.
“It’s not just this year, next year, or the next four years,” she says. “There is, unfortunately, a broad set of supporters who support these bigoted policies. It’s not just about Trump, but the power of the White House is taking it to a whole other level.”
Muslim Advocates received in-kind funding from El-Hibri. It has also received grants from the Ford, Kellogg, and Open Society foundations.
Over the past year, other donors have increased gifts to Muslim Americans to promote scholarship that focuses on religion as a vehicles for peace. For instance, Rafat and Zoreen Ansari, two doctors who emigrated from Pakistan to South Bend, Ind. gave $15 million to start a religious-studies program at the University of Notre Dame.
Some grant makers have been badgered by opponents who object when they fund Muslim groups. For example, the Middle East Forum, a nonprofit that works to defeat radical Islam, called upon the Silicon Valley Community Foundation to pull funding from the Council on American Islamic Relations, saying it promoted extremism. The council has posted a lengthy rebuttal to what it views as conspiracy theories about its objectives.
Emmett Carson, president of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation responded by Twitter, writing that it “won’t be cowed by those who espouse hate and intolerance.”
Mr. Latif is used to being in the middle of a public whirlwind. In addition to being tormented by Islamophobes, he’s been the target of death threats from the Islamic State.
“It comes from both sides,” he says.
Correction: Statements in an earlier version of this story about El-Hibri’s strategy in its early years, and its focus this spring, have been revised. In addition, the foundation’s assets have been updated to reflect more recent figures provided by El-Hibri.