(RNS3-APR14) Muhammad Rasoul and his wife Michele laugh while talking about how they met. Both were raised as Christians but converted to Islam. For use with RNS-MUSLIM-IMAGE, transmitted April 14, 2009. Religion News Service photo by Katy Batdorff/The Grand Rapids Press.
(RNS3-APR14) Muhammad Rasoul and his wife Michele laugh while talking about how they met. Both were raised as Christians but converted to Islam. For use with RNS-MUSLIM-IMAGE, transmitted April 14, 2009. Religion News Service photo by Katy Batdorff/The Grand Rapids Press.
(RNS3-APR14) Muhammad Rasoul and his wife Michele laugh while talking about how they met. Both were raised as Christians but converted to Islam. For use with RNS-MUSLIM-IMAGE, transmitted April 14, 2009. Religion News Service photo by Katy Batdorff/The Grand Rapids Press.
EAST GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Muhammad Rasoul has been in back-to-back meetings since 5:30 a.m., starting with a conference call to Japan and London. He hopes to be home in time to put his two young kids to bed.
But in this typical wire-to-wire day as chief operating officer of a currency trading firm, Rasoul also will make time for something sacred: the five prayers Muslims are expected to make each day.
“Anytime, I can close that door and do whatever I have to do,” Rasoul says of his airy office at Global Forex Trading. “I really benefit from having that five minutes of peace and quiet to myself. It’s almost like a meditation.”
Prayer is an obligation Rasoul takes seriously, as he does all other aspects of his adopted Islamic faith. Whether it’s flying to Singapore on business or teaching his children about God, Rasoul says Islam is his guidebook for doing the right thing.
If you think you know who Muslims are, meet Rasoul.
And then think again.
With his Christian Midwest upbringing, reddish-blond hair and Amish-style beard, he doesn’t fit the popular image of a typical Muslim. A colorful prayer rug hangs near his office door and prayer beads dangle next to a whiteboard. On it, over a diagram of the company’s international offices, is written in Arabic, “In the name of God, the most merciful, the most beneficent.”
“I put it up here just as a reminder,” says Rasoul, 36, intensely talkative and friendly in a guy-next-door way. “It wouldn’t be possible for me to work the way I work if I didn’t have a firm understanding of why I’m doing it.”
Taking a cue from the popular WWJD bracelets, he will ask himself in every major decision, “What would Muhammad do?”
“Those values I have for the right way of doing things — I can’t separate that from my job or my home,” he says.
That conviction has served him well at Global Forex, a fast-growing online currency trading firm that operates under the brand GFT.
Since he joined as the firm’s third employee in 1996, it has grown to 350 employees worldwide, with more than 150 working under him. GFT has three U.S. offices and five others from the United Kingdom to Dubai, with customers in more than 120 countries.
His job as executive vice president and COO is turbocharged, piling up 500 to 800 e-mails a day and flying more than 120,000 miles a year. He has risen through the ranks quickly since joining GFT as a college intern.
Kurt Hoeksema, the firm’s vice president of trading and risk management, was surprised when he met Rasoul 10 years ago and found his boss named Muhammad was actually a white guy from the suburbs.
“Faith is the most important thing in my life,” said Hoeksema, who attends an evangelical megachurch. “I believe the same is true for him.”
Rasoul said he extends the same Islamic values that he employs in the office to the 1908 home he shares with his wife, Michele, and two kids, Nadia, 8, and Yaseen, 6.
It’s a largely typical American family, though they don’t celebrate Easter or Christmas. The kids enjoy holidays with their grandparents as Muhammad and Michele teach them Islamic values and the meaning of the holy month of Ramadan.
Michele’s hopes for the children are the same as those of most mothers.
“I want my kids to grow up to be happy and to be accepted for who they are,” says Michele, 39, explaining she feels at home with Islam, a faith she adopted three years after marrying Muhammad in 1996.
“I had these ideas about what a Muslim woman was,” says Michele, who grew up attending Baptist Sunday school. “I thought women wore hijabs (head coverings) because guys didn’t want their wives to be seen.”
In reality, she has found women are “honored” by Islam and that she is not obligated to wear the hijab. She rarely does because she doesn’t like drawing stares, or cashiers shouting “DO YOU WANT PLASTIC OR PAPER?” as if she didn’t understand English.
But she appreciates the direct relationship to God she feels Islam affords, that she doesn’t “have to go talk to some man and have him tell me all the things I had to do to get right with God.”
Muhammad, who was born Russell V. Brown III and raised in the conservative Anglican Catholic Church, also had misconceptions about Islam before he learned its basics from a deli clerk near the Kinko’s where he worked the night shift.
One night, Muhammad talked to the clerk, Yusef Ali, about the turban he was wearing and Ali told him about Islam.
“As soon as I saw him, I was like, `There’s something different about this guy,”‘ recalls Ali, 37. “He was charismatic, and he was interested in learning. Before we knew it, we were off and running.”
Rasoul was ready. He had been wrestling with doubts about God and had been studying other religious traditions. Ali began feeding him books on Islam. Rasoul devoured them.
Through reading and meeting Muslims, Rasoul found Islam clicked. He saw it as an extension of Christian teaching, though it portrayed Jesus as a prophet, not God’s son.
“Really, it didn’t go contrary to the way I was brought up,” he asserts. “In fact, it confirmed what I felt was right about how I was brought up and clarified things I had issues with.”
He made his declaration of faith, or shahada, at a gas station where Ali worked. Soon after, he moved into a house with Ali and others that functioned as a prayer and teaching center.
He took the name Muhammad Al-amin Rasoul, Arabic for “Muhammad the trustworthy messenger.” The name is apt, he says, because, as a Caucasian, he delivers a message by dispelling people’s preconceptions about Islam.
“There are plenty of times in a business meeting (when) one guy says, `I have never met someone named Muhammad who looks like you.’ It gives me an opportunity to explain and expand their understanding of what Islam is.”
(Charles Honey writes for The Grand Rapids Press in Grand Rapids, Mich.)
