Chowan did not require the standardized English proficiency exam then widely mandated for international students, a fact that spread through the global academic network. Foreign enrollees often spent a semester or two at Chowan, improved their English and then transferred to four-year universities.
Mohammed applied to Chowan as a Pakistani citizen shortly after graduating from Fahaheel Secondary in 1983, according to college records. He told school administrators that he had heard of the college from a friend in Kuwait. His bill -- $2,245 for the spring semester -- was paid in full the day of matriculation, Jan. 10, 1984. He told fellow students that his father was dead and that his brothers picked up the tab.
"He took his studies seriously and was a very good Muslim," said Badawi Hindieh, a Palestinian from Fahaheel who attended Chowan at the same time.
Acquaintances knew him as Khalid Shaikh, a name that stuck in people's minds. Mohammed, acquaintances said, was culturally integrated into Arab and Kuwaiti society and could have passed as a Kuwaiti Arab.
"Khalid Shaikh spoke very good Arabic, like a Kuwaiti, but introduced himself as a Pakistani," Hindieh said. "We knew he was Baluchi."
Later in life, as Mohammed used multiple identities and moved from the Gulf to Afghanistan, the West and beyond, this ability to immerse in varying cultures would serve him well.
By 1984, about 50 of the 650 or so male students at Chowan were Middle Easterners, including a sizable contingent from Fahaheel and elsewhere in Kuwait. The local boys had a name for them: "Abbie Dahbies."
The Arab students were frequent recipients of anti-Iranian epithets in the years after the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The foreigners were sometimes viewed as cliquish.
"They seemed to be praying all the time," recalled John Franklin Timberlake, a 1984 Chowan graduate, now a police officer in Murfreesboro. "Just chanting, like. We never understood a word of it. Sometimes we'd come home late on a weekend night, maybe after we'd had a few beers, and they'd still be praying."
At Chowan, Mohammed embarked on a pre-engineering curriculum -- popular among the foreigners.
"He was a good student -- a bit better than a B-type student," Garth D. Faile, chairman of the science department, said in an interview this fall.
Mohammed, like every student, was required to attend a once-a-week chapel service based on Christian doctrine.
