DAISY KHAN had never seen so many Jews in her life. The year was 1974, and Ms. Khan, an awkward, artistic 16-year-old who had just emigrated from India to the suburban Long Island enclave of Jericho, N.Y., was attending her first day of school in America.
It was not going well.
Her fellow students giggled at the newcomer with the dark skin, exotic accent and unfamiliar religion. Few Muslims, it seemed, had ever attended the mostly Jewish Jericho High School. When a teacher asked her to stand and introduce herself, the questions came fast: Did she ride a camel? Did she ride an elephant?
“It was very strange when you are 16 years old and you have to explain your religion to an entire class,” Ms. Khan, now 52, recalled recently in the Upper West Side offices of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, her nonprofit group. “But that’s where my first activism began. I realized that actually I was a spokesperson for Islam.”
It is a role she now inhabits on a far larger scale. Since the summer, Ms. Khan, a former architectural designer, has emerged as an eloquent and indefatigable public face of the maelstrom surrounding Park51, the Islamic community center and mosque that she and her husband, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, are trying to build two blocks north of ground zero.
A modern Muslim who prefers high fashion to the hijab, Ms. Khan has become a lightning rod for the anger of right-wing bloggers and commentators who consider the Islamic center an affront to the victims of Sept. 11, or worse.
Despite her message of inclusion, Ms. Khan has been accused by critics of being an extremist in a moderate’s garb, hiding a conservative Islamic agenda behind a friendly, modern face. “Daisy Khan can say what she wants,” L. Brent Bozell III, the founder of the conservative Media Research Center, said on Fox News last month. “This is what you expect from a radical like her.”
Some Muslims, too, have criticized Ms. Khan and her husband, saying they represent an elite subset of American Islam that was naïve about the anger its plans might generate.
But as the project became daily grist for news talk shows and a flash point in the midterm elections, Ms. Khan has transformed herself from an obscure leader in the nonprofit world into a fierce spokeswoman, passionately defending the project and, inevitably, finding herself cast as the voice of moderate Islam.
She parries with news anchors like Christiane Amanpour, on the ABC News program “This Week,” and was even asked to intervene when a pastor threatened a Koran burning in Florida this past Sept. 11.
“We Muslims are really fed up of having to be defined by the actions of the extremists," Ms. Khan told Laura Ingraham, the Fox News host, in one of her first talk-show appearances last December. “We are law-abiding citizens. We are faithful people. We are very good Americans. And we need to project a different message of Islam, one of tolerance, love and the kind of commonalities we have with different faith communities.”
Fame for being a spiritual leader may seem an unlikely development for a woman who, in her early life, abandoned her faith, sickened by images of violence that many Americans now associate with Islam. And it was certainly not the role she had planned.
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