Seddiq Behrooz has been an American for years, even if he was born in Afghanistan. He coaches his 10-year-old son’s soccer team, lives in a four-bedroom home with a dishwasher and a grill in the backyard in a typical all-American neighborhood off Mooresville Road.
He goes to Gay’s Chapel Methodist Church with his wife, Judy, at Christmas and Easter — and all the other special occasions like homecomings and often when there is no special occasion.
He loves barbecue and hush puppies.
And he and Judy have bought a burial plot in Rowan County.
But suddenly — on Sept. 11 — words took on a different meaning.
Especially words like “Muslim terrorists.”
“When Timothy McVeigh did what he did in Oklahoma or Eric Rudolph bombed the abortion clinic, nobody called them ‘Christian terrorists,’ ” he says. “That makes a lot of people confused, as though being a Muslim makes a person a terrorist. A terrorist is a terrorist ... ”
And Seddiq Behrooz, a native of Afghanistan and a Muslim who’s now an American citizen, reacted like all other Americans reacted on Sept. 11 — with shock, horror, disbelief.
An engineer with KoSa, he was talking to a co-worker about a project that morning when a woman rushed in to the office to tell them a plane had crashed into a building in New York.
“My friend got on his computer, but couldn’t find anything,” he says, so they quickly went looking for information and found people gathering in the hall, asking, trying to find out what ...
Someone turned on a radio. Someone else logged on to CNN on a computer.
“And for the first time,” he says, “we saw the building. And the fireball. It was unbelievable.”
They stood and watched, unable to move, like people all over the United States stood before television sets and computer screens on that beautiful September morning and watched, horrified, disbelieving what they saw.
He remembers somebody said, “It could be that guy from Saudi Arabia, bin Ladin. Osama bin Ladin.”
His name was tied to so many other terrorist acts — the bombing at the World Trade Center in 1993 and a Philippine airliner in 1994, the Mubarak assassination attempt in Ethiopia in ‘95, the destruction of the Air Force apartment building in Saudi Arabia in ‘96, the bomb blasts in Nairobi and Kenya and Tanzania in ‘98 and the USS Cole in 2000.
“I bet he’s probably behind this, too,” someone said.
And they kept on watching while the date — Sept. 11 — etched itself into their minds as indelibly as Dec. 7 had etched itself into American minds more than half a century ago.
“It was unbelievable,” Seddiq says again, still unable to grasp the enormity of what happened.
When he got home that night, Judy and the children — Jonathan, 15, Susan 12, and Sharif, 10 — were watching, too, “hooked,” he says, “to the television set,” unable to look away, as unable to believe what they were seeing as their dad and the rest of the country.
But no one, he says, despite the shock, the horror, the disbelief, no one, not that day nor the next nor any day since Sept. 11 has pointed a finger at him or his wife or his children because he’s a Muslim from Afghanistan. No one has made any of them feel different or isolated in any way.
As the news reports indicated that bin Ladin was the No. 1 suspected of being the mastermind behind the terrorist bombing on that never-to-be-forgotten day, he says, “people call. Friends from work or church, they call me at home and tell me they’re sorry. I tell them I am more saddened by the people who lost their lives here. They say, ‘We just want to make sure nobody has harassed you. You are one of us.’ ”
He was touched, but not surprised that people from the church called.
“I am a Muslim, but I go to church many, many times with my family.
“And as a wedding gift, my dad sent my wife a necklace that was a cross. I believe deeply there is only one God for all of us. Some minor things we disagree shouldn’t be important to classify people. God wants us to be human beings. We are his creatures. He wants us to be truthful, don’t steal, don’t lie, be helpful to society, care about other people before yourself and work.
“There is a God who created us and the universe. You’ve got to praise him for all he has given us.”
Seddiq grew up dreaming of coming to America. His older brother, Dr. Ghulam Rafat, now on the staff of the VA hospital in Lynchburg, Va., was an internist at the Salisbury Veterans Hospital then and had been in this country a long time.
But the dream didn’t bring him here.
Russia did.
“Russia had occupied the country in 1979, and it was mandatory to join the army,” he says. He had just finished college with a degree in architecture, had worked for four months when war broke out and he was about to be drafted.
“When the Russians drafted you, you had to fight your people on the side of Russia. I never wanted to be in a fight taking life, and I didn’t want to be on Russia’s side and fight my people.
“The only choice I had was to get out of Afghanistan.”
So he talked to his family who were, he says, among the fortunate people in Afghanistan. Descended from a Persian king who brought educational and architectural advancement to the land, his grandfather was once governor of their province. They believed in women’s freedom and education, and his grandfather and father were big farmers.
More than big.
“Huge farmers, who had owned almost a whole province, so my dad knew a lot of people,” including a business man in Pakistan, who helped Seddiq.
No one could go directly from Afghanistan to the United States because there was no embassy, no relationship between the two countries.
“So I went to Pakistan and waited there for about two months until my brother resolved all the problems and helped me come from there to here.”
They had always been in constant contact with his brother who sent money back to Afghanistan before the Russians went in. He hoped to build a house, thinking he might retire and go back some day.
“But after the Russians came,” Seddiq says, “my dad wrote him not to come back ... ”
His brother never did.
Instead Seddiq came here on Sept. 16, 1980. He was 24 years old and got a degree in architecture in the engineering school sponsored by the United States at Kabul University. He knew English because his his textbooks had been in English, but his ability with the spoken language needed time and practice, so he couldn’t get a job in his field here or in the Washington area.
But he found two jobs near Washington — at the Pizza Hut and Roy Rogers — and worked them simultaneously until he came here to visit to visit his family in December and found work with Daniels Construction Co., the in-house contractor with Fiber Industries, which is now KoSa.
Nine months later, the Daniels company discovered he had a degree in architecture and offered him a drafting job which he kept as long as Daniels was there. At the same time he went to UNC Charlotte for a degree in mechanical engineering. Now he’s an engineer working directly for KoSa. His largest job there has been designing, drawing, coordinating contractors and budgeting a million-dollar office building there.
For the first two years he was here, he says, he wrote letters and heard from his father regularly, but none of his immediate family is in Afghanistan now.
His mother died there not long after he left. One sister also came to the United States and another went to Germany. His other sister and brother went to Holland where his father joined them, and Seddiq and his family visited him there three times before he died in 2000.
But he has no contact with Afghanistan.
“I haven’t had any written or telephone conversation with anyone there in the last 16 years. There is no post there. Everything is a war.”
The country changed after Russia moved in and changed more when the Taliban took over after the Russians left.
“I told my friends here a long time ago, just talking around the lunch table, that the Taliban is not a legitimate government. Half are from Pakistan. They got together and just took over by force. They were not elected by the people. They don’t have nothing good about them to be called Muslim. From what I know about the religion, they don’t represent Muslims.
“They grow drugs. They abuse women. They carry a gun around all the time, and anybody with a mind will understand that is not the way of God. Anyone. But that’s what Taliban is all about. They are destroying the religion and using it to advance their cause. They are very dark-minded, very radical and a group of trouble-makers. They are like gangsters.
“I don’t feel bad at all for them to pay a price. They need to be out of power.”
Dr. Ghulam Rafat, the brother who helped Seddiq come to this country 21 years ago, echoes his feelings.
“I really feel very bad this act of terrorism against thousands of innocent people,” he says, “and about the situation in Afghanistan. The nation of Afghanistan is hijacked by these extremists and these terrorists. Right now the Taliban are in charge. They were created by Pakistan, and Pakistan has an agenda there. They want the Taliban government to have power to use Afghanistan to strike back at India and also to dominate the small republics in central Asia that were part of the Soviet Union and are free now in the area.
“They are funded by bin Ladin and some private wealthy people in the Middle East. They are very strict fundamentalists,” a coalition of Pakistanis, Arabs from the Middle East, Burma, Bangladesh, Chechnya, from all over ...
The atrocities, he says, are committed by international terrorists. Killing is totally against the teaching of Islam. It is absolutely forbidden.
Like his brother here, he and his family have felt no prejudice directed toward them since the horrors in New York and Washington on Sept. 11.
“We have not seen that at all,” the doctor says.
And both are happy they’re Americans.
Maybe, friends suggest when they explain why their last names differ, coming here was foreshadowed by their names.
The family name in Afghanistan, as well as other countries in Asia, is not the last name as it is in the western world.
“When I was applying for citizenship,” Seddiq explains, “we had to prove Ghulam and I are were brothers. In Afghanistan you just choose your last name from the dictionary. You pick a word you like. A lot of people do that when they go to college, not everybody, but whoever wants to can pick up a last name. So you have a first name, a middle name, a family name and a last name. Our family name is Timory. My brother picked Rafat for a last name because it means someone with luck. I picked Behrooz because it means someone with a better tomorrow.”
His sister in California kept the family name as her last name, and now he wishes he and his brother had done that, too.
But becoming a citizen of the United States has meant good luck for his brother, he says, and he certainly has had a better tomorrow than he would have had in Afghanistan.
“And I’m grateful I ended up here,” he says. “This is a country that has one thing most precious to any human being. That is freedom. It not only allows freedom to the people here, but it also offers it to other people. This is my home, and I will defend this home with my blood if it becomes necessary. ... I can volunteer if they need me to go there and help.”
Contact Rose Post at 704-797-4251 or rpost@salisburypost.com
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