Keeping the FaithAugust 23. 2005 12:00AM

Thank you, Pam Sacks, for this very nice article about me and my family. And Joshua.

August 23. 2005 12:00AMKeeping the faithMuslim writer reaches out to young men of Islam through novel
By Pamela H. Sacks TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFFpsacks@telegram.com
Jamilah Kolocotronis was teaching social studies when she heard about the 9-11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.“When I found out, I said, ‘Please don’t let Muslims be involved,’ ”
Ms. Kolocotronis said, giving voice to a vivid and painful recollection.Ms. Kolocotronis and her husband, a native of Thailand, are Muslims who have six sons ranging in age from 9 to 23. Even before 9-11, their three older boys, all teenagers at the time, had long felt they were treated with opprobrium. Muslim extremists had been in the news since the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. “Everyone blames us,” they would say. “Everyone thinks we are terrorists.”
Ms. Kolocotronis, who lived with her family in Worcester from July 2004 until a few weeks ago, is of Greek descent. She converted from Christianity to Islam when she was 23.
As a white woman, coping with prejudice was a new experience.Yet on the day the Twin Towers fell, Ms. Kolocotronis, who wears a hijab, or headscarf, fully understood her sons’ ordeal.“I felt I could not go out, even though I was only a mile from home,” she said. “They talked a lot about the anger on TV. I stayed inside for four days and then took my two older sons with me as bodyguards.”When the mother and sons stepped out the door on Sept. 15, 2001, they were taken aback at how well they were treated.“I had no bad experiences,” Ms. Kolocotronis said. “People were even more intentionally polite than usual.”
Over the last four years, however, the pressures on American Muslims have only increased. The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians has ground on. The war in Afghanistan was punctuated by a terrorist attack in October 2002 that killed 180 people in a nightclub in Bali. The fighting in Iraq got under way in the spring of 2003; last month, 57 people were killed in suicide bombings in London.“If I go out shopping today and people start staring at me, I’ll turn on the radio right away to see what happened,” Ms. Kolocotronis, 49, said a few days ago from her new home in Milwaukee. “Still overall, you get a lot of the kindness, at the bank and the store. But sometimes you do feel like running.”
Ms. Kolocotronis has chosen to react to events in another way. She has become a novelist, with the specific intention of helping young Muslim men.Her first book, “Innocent People,” was about the life of a Muslim family in the year after 9-11 Ms. Kolocotronis writes about a mother and her five sons. They receive harassing phone calls, and someone throws a rock through the window of the father’s restaurant. At the same time, a Catholic school sends a banner and warm words of support to the children’s Muslim school. Ms. Kolocotronis includes an incident based on something that actually happened to her: The town librarian called to say, “You must be having a hard time. What can I do?”
As the story unfolds, the mother talks to her sons about how they can change the perception of Muslims, just as Ms. Kolocotronis and her husband, Abdul-Munim Jitmoud, have done with their children. “We would ask, ‘What good manners can we have to show people who we really are?’ ” she said.
As an American and a mother of boys, she worried when she heard talk about young men overseas getting involved in terrorism. She concluded that she could, perhaps, offer guidance to young American Muslims, bolstering their Islamic identity to give them the strength to overcome challenges from within and from the world at large.Those thoughts led to her second novel, “Echoes” (Heliographica, $15.95), which was published early this summer. It is the first of a five-part series
Ms. Kolocotronis plans to write about the life of Joshua Adams, a troubled young man from a broken home who drinks, smokes marijuana and gets his high school girlfriend pregnant He marries her. After they have three children, he walks out.Joshua is taken in by Muslim friends, and he converts. He is introduced to a Muslim girl and falls in love. As he fights his old habits and confronts past mistakes, different Muslim men are always present to offer guidance and help. Still, as Ms. Kolocotronis puts it, “Change does not come easily. Joshua must deal with the echoes of his past.” Gradually, he realizes fulfillment comes from dedication to God and caring for others.
Ms. Kolocotronis emphasizes the sense of community in Islam, that an important part of the faith is to support and care for one another, as opposed to being caught up in personal needs and goals that can be a source of alienation. “You pray shoulder to shoulder,” she said. “When you greet, you shake hands.”
A photograph of Mrs. Kolocotronis with her family shows a woman with an open, cheerful demeanor — one who seems to have found her place in life. During a lengthy phone interview, she talked quickly and often laughed at herself. Her legal name is Linda Jitmoud. She was born Linda Kolocotronis and took Jamilah as her Muslim name. Jamilah Kolocotronis is her pen name; she prefers to use it in public forums.As a young woman, she was a devout Lutheran. She met her future husband while studying religion and philosophy at Truman State University in Missouri. “I was strongly Christian, and I tried to convert him at first,” she said. “I asked him to come to church with me, and he brought a copy of the Qu’ran. I was really embarrassed.”
Believing she wanted to be a Lutheran minister, she entered a seminary in Chicago, but was soon disillusioned and returned to Missouri. After she carefully studied the Qu’ran, it came to her in a flash one hot and muggy that night that she wanted to convert. She dashed off to a little mosque that Mr. Jitmoud and two other Muslim men had formed.“I said I was thinking about being Muslim,” she said. “They immediately gave me the confession of faith. I decided to give it a year, and by the end of the year, I was completely convinced.”
After she and her husband were married, she followed in Mr. Jitmoud’s footsteps and entered a doctoral program in social science education at Ball State University in Indiana. He worked at odd jobs to support their growing family so that his wife could complete her studies.Now, Mr. Jitmoud administers Muslim schools while his wife teaches and writes.
The family has lived in Seattle, the Midwest and Thailand. They were in Kansas City for 12 years before Mr. Jitmoud became principal of Alhuda, a Muslim school in Worcester.The Jitmouds found Worcester’s Muslim community to be welcoming and generous. But Massachusetts was less to their liking. “I was surprised at the provincialism,” Ms. Kolocotronis remarked. “I would have thought it was very progressive. Most people don’t realize there’s a life outside of Massachusetts.”And the drivers are rude, she said, laughing. “I was really happy when the Boston Red Sox won the World Series because everyone was polite for two weeks.”
As a doctoral candidate, Ms. Kolocotronis focused her research on Islamic jihad, or, the struggle against injustice. She started with the taking of American hostages in 1979 in Iran. She looked at jihad in Pakistan, Iran, Egypt and Afghanistan during the 1980s In studying the religious roots of jihad, she said she learned it is meant to be used only as a defense against aggression. “We don’t just go out and attack,” she said. “There is no killing or destruction of property, no death by fire or bombs of any kind. One prophet said, ‘Don’t even harm trees.’ ”
Faith is a common subject in the family. The Jitmouds’ eldest son is in France studying Arabic. He married a Spanish woman he met in class and will become a father in five months. The other children are at home.
A Muslim, Ms. Kolocotronis said, is someone who obeys God.“I can say that 9-11 was not done by Muslims,” Ms. Kolocotronis said with conviction. “Whatever the political motivation, they couldn’t have done it in God’s name. They were not Muslims in the sense of acting in Islam. I wonder how much they believed.“I guess none of us can know.”