Amir Ali can’t wait for the world to rediscover its Islamic roots. He calls Abraham a great man for preparing the world for the prophet Muhammad. But around the 13th century, Ali says, someone brought hypocrisy into the mix and the prophet’s message got corrupted. Islam has had an image problem ever since.
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“We’re supposed to be honest, truthful, and excel in relationships between God and man, relationships between other people, and in our professions,” says Ali, who calls himself a moderate and Jerry Falwell an extremist. But he is disappointed by the failure of Muslims to become leaders in fields like computer technology, medicine, finance, education. “God has promised us to become superpower of the world,” he says. But before that can happen, followers “have to go back to the original books of the Koran. If God is pleased, they will get the gold medal–the whole world will become Muslim.”
Ignorance is the enemy, says Ali, who first began introducing Americans to Islam in 1962, the same year he moved from Hyderabad, India, to Iowa City. As an undergrad at the University of Iowa he met his wife, Mary, who is of German-Swedish descent. In 1967 Ali attended a technological conference in Washington, D.C., where he heard about an imam who performed Islamic marriages. So he called Mary and told her to get on a Greyhound and head east. The couple ended up here after Ali got a scholarship to pursue his PhD in biochemistry at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
Without hesitating, Ali answered, “You take a bath nude.”
