Translating Arabic into injustice

I HAVE BEEN teaching modern Middle Eastern history for more than 20 years. I've helped train many graduate students, some of whom have gone on to become professors at universities across the country. But one of my current New York University graduate students, Mohammed Yousry, faces a very different future. Convicted a year ago of participating in a conspiracy to abet terrorism, he may be sentenced to as many as 20 years in federal prison.

Knowing Mohammed as I do, and having followed his trial closely, I am convinced that he is a victim of the kind of excessive prosecutorial zeal we have seen all too much of since 9/11. But his case is especially disturbing because what may put Mohammed behind bars is the work he did in good faith as a translator and an academic researcher. This would turn a travesty of justice into a very dangerous precedent.

A gentle and unassuming man, Mohammed came to this country from Egypt 25 years ago. He and his wife (an evangelical Christian) had a daughter who would eventually graduate from a Baptist college. Mohammed became a U.S. citizen. When I first met him in 1995, he was a graduate student at NYU, paying his tuition and supporting his family by driving a taxi and by working as a translator of Arabic for journalists and lawyers. One of the lawyers who hired Mohammed was Lynne Stewart, among whose clients was Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind former spiritual guide of a radical Islamist organization in Egypt who is now serving a life sentence for plotting to blow up New York City landmarks.

When Mohammed began to discuss possible doctoral dissertation topics with me seven or eight years ago, I encouraged him to write a political biography of Abdel Rahman, partly because his employment as a translator for Stewart gave him unique access to the imprisoned cleric. Though a lifelong secularist and democrat who totally rejects Abdel Rahman's extremist version of Islam, Mohammed started gathering material on the cleric for his dissertation, and even interviewed him about his ideas and political career during government-authorized prison visits with Stewart.

Mohammed's diligence as a translator and an academic researcher would cost him dearly. In April 2002, he was arrested, along with Stewart and one of her paralegals. They were accused of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. Two years earlier, Stewart had told a reporter that the imprisoned Abdel Rahman opposed a cease-fire that his supporters had negotiated with the Egyptian government. Though no act of violence ever resulted, the U.S. government claimed that Stewart had not only violated government regulations -- which she had agreed to follow -- restricting communications with Rahman but that she had also abetted terrorism.