This Iowa heart doctor wants to improve America's attitude toward Muslims

Rasa - The man’s voice rings out from the front of the sanctuary and pierces the steady buzz of conversation. A beautiful, supple melody in Arabic asks worshippers to fall silent and draw near.

News ID: 426199

Date: 31 December 2016 - 23:55

RNA - The man’s voice rings out from the front of the sanctuary and pierces the steady buzz of conversation. A beautiful, supple melody in Arabic asks worshippers to fall silent and draw near.

The singer, Rami Eltibi, possesses a powerful set of lungs. But by trade, he’s a man of the heart. He’s an interventional cardiologist at Mercy Medical Center, a heart doctor.

On Friday afternoons, he takes a break from medicine to focus on the spirit. Eltibi drives his black BMW to the city's western fringe, next door to a glass repair shop, where often he sings the “adhan,” or the call to mandatory prayer for Muslims.

Several years ago, there would have been relative few here in this city of 60,000 to answer his call.

But now, Eltibi stands inside a prominent symbol of the local Muslim community’s robust growth: Iowa’s newest mosque. Its minaret pokes skyward at the end of a cul de sac. The front of the building aims toward the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia.

Eltibi, 37, became president in March of this Tri-State Islamic Center and is one of The Des Moines Register's People to Watch in 2017. In the year ahead, he intends to help re-frame the public conversation about his faith,  which was targeted in the months after a divisive election amid vandalism at mosques nationally and reports of bias against Muslims.

Eltibi's mosque, true to its name, is poised to serve a wide region in three states, including an estimated 150 Muslims in the university town of Platteville, Wis., about 40 miles northeast.

Eltibi basically qualifies as a Sunni Muslim, but he rejects even the notion of sects. For him, there is only one true Islam. And it's utterly peaceful.

“Muslims are not as what they say in the media most of the time,” he said. “My religion taught me to be somebody who helps others regardless of their religion. … To bring mercy to everyone without discriminating.”

The doctor faces a daunting task. President-elect Donald Trump recently reaffirmed that he is serious about trying to force American Muslims to register, while temporarily banning more from entering the country. In daily headlines, all of Islam often is unfairly smeared as being synonymous with terrorism. But every faith gets a black eye from its extremists.

"We are normal people," Eltibi said. "We love our family."

He joined a local medical clinic two years ago. He still divides his time between Dubuque and Baltimore, where his wife is a pharmacist and professor of public health at the University of Maryland. They have three children, ages 9, 8 and 2.

But this is the family's home. He's part of a unique, open conversation about religion in Dubuque. A group called Children of Abraham helped to blaze the trail six years ago when a Muslim, a Christian and a Jew began to convert their private conversations into a monthly public meeting.

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