"It wasn't like there was tension or anything, but that's just the way it was," said Winfred S. Kenner, who studied mechanical engineering at the sprawling, tree-lined campus east of downtown.
The Middle Easterners tended to live off campus in anonymous complexes like the Yorktown and the Colonial, seldom ate in the cafeteria and skipped organized events. While "Aggies" trundled off in merry droves to Saturday football games, the foreign students arranged soccer matches in the park. They socialized mainly with one another.
"It was the college life: We used to get together three, four times a week, watch the games, chat, drink, you know," said Sami Zitawi, a Kuwaiti native who recalled large get-togethers of Arabs on Friday, the Muslim holy day. "We used to go to the farmers, buy a lamb or a goat. Butcher it with a knife.... Every Friday night someone would have a big dinner: 15, 20, 25 students."
Political discussions inevitably occurred. The year before Mohammed's arrival, students in Greensboro marched in protest of the 1982 massacres of Palestinians at refugee camps in Lebanon -- though the Arab visitors learned to mute their criticisms.
The Middle Eastern students were far from a monolith. Differences in politics, culture and, especially, in the practice of Islam tore at regional solidarity.
"Basically, what you saw was a micro-society of our home," explained Mahmood Zubaid, a Kuwaiti architectural engineer. "Everybody fit in where they felt most comfortable."
A social barrier separated the elite scholarship boys like Zubaid and students like Mohammed, the Baluchi, and the Palestinians, reliant on their families or smaller grants for tuition and living expenses. But religion was the real dividing line.
Wherever large concentrations of Middle Eastern students gathered on Western campuses, graduates say, groups of religious conservatives sprung up. These self-appointed moral overseers endeavored to ensure adherence to Koranic values and avoidance of wine, women, drugs and other vices. They grew beards as religious statements and prayed five times a day, typically in makeshift mosques in apartments or university-provided centers. And they actively recruited fellow students.
"We called them the mullahs," recalled Waleed M. Qimlass, a 1980s A&T graduate who now directs environmental affairs for Kuwait City. "Basically, the students at Greensboro were divided into the mullahs and the non-mullahs."
