US News, July 26, 2002
Sadiq Reza makes sense out of 9/11 attacks for his students
By Arun Kristian Das
As a New York City-born Muslim of Indian heritage, Sadiq Reza finds himself in a unique position among his law professor colleagues. His students at New York Law School, which is located seven blocks from where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center stood until the morning of September 11, have made Reza their lightning rod for questions, concerns and fears in a troubled world.
"In class, it was typically channeled in terms of issues of criminal procedure," says Reza, who teaches that subject. "On the other hand there were issues in the classroom that exceeded the doctrinal discussion, and I encouraged those discussions as much as I could."
The engaging, well-versed 37-year-old associate professor--himself an escapee from the WTC destruction (he lives in Battery Park City, next to Ground Zero)--says the entire law school community needed to make sense out of last year's insanity.
"He comes from a nontraditional background for American law teaching, both in his ethnic background and religious background, and the advantages that brings to the classroom are quite profound," says Richard Matasar, the dean and president of New York Law School. He adds that after September 11, Reza, one of only a handful of Muslim law professors in the nation, "was able to bring a perspective that bridges others' experiences, and I think especially in these trying times it's wonderful to have someone on your faculty that can do that."
Prior to adding this unofficial angle to his job description last September, Reza had been teaching at the law school for two years after a busy first career as a practicing attorney in public, nonprofit and private service. It was a career that seemed inevitable to him considering his history.
Reza, the middle of three brothers, grew up in New York (Jackson Heights), Pittsburgh and Orlando. Originally from Hyderabad, his parents, who had come to the United States in the late 1950s, encouraged Reza to become "a doctor, or a lawyer, or an engineer, or a businessman," he says. Though his father is an electrical engineer, Reza did not follow that path. Reza knew early on that his strengths lay not in math or hard science, but in literature and social sciences. And so it seemed likely that after earning a bachelor's degree at Princeton University, he would eventually go on to law school in order to pursue worthy causes.
"Whenever we would go to India, I was very disturbed at the sight of the poor," Reza says of trips his family made when he was just a boy. "I would say something like 'Isn't anybody doing something to help these people?' " Thus the seed was planted for Reza's social conscience. In college, Reza had "an intellectual awakening" with the joy of being challenged by topics such as political science and Middle Eastern studies. Though by 1986, Harvard Law School had already offered him admission, Reza deferred for two years to pursue an opportunity he couldn't refuse: Teaching English and studying Arabic in Cairo, Egypt.
"It was a second awakening," he says. "As a Muslim, having been born and raised in [the United States], to be living in a Muslim country, surrounded by the sensibilities of people who are Muslim, was a phenomenal experience."
Though Reza had visited India many times with his family, he says that living in Egypt gave him an understanding of his Islamic heritage that India--as a non-Muslim nation--simply could not. "I wanted to understand the religion," he says. "I wanted to be able to read [the Quran] in its original Arabic text, and to be able to know enough about it to endorse or reject certain practices of the faith if I wanted to." It helped him define and become comfortable with his Muslim identity.
Like any well-rounded person, he pursues interests outside academia, including theatre (he acted in plays at the American University in Cairo), listening to and playing music (he's a drummer), reading (Herman Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund is one of his favorites), and staying in shape--he plays squash and swims up to five times a week. Certainly the rigors of keeping a chock-full schedule of teaching, speaking and writing require maintaining physical fitness, and with Reza it shows: he is a trim man who moves with the ease of an athlete.
Despite his upbringing, Reza's heroes are all decidedly American. He cites as important influences the Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln; Henry Clay, the 19th century U.S. lawmaker who said "I would rather be right than be president"; Ralph Nader, the crusading consumer advocate cum presidential candidate (and Al Gore spoiler), who, like Reza, is a graduate of both Princeton University and Harvard Law); and Al Pacino's attorney character in the 1979 courtroom drama ...And Justice for All. Combine them, and what do you get? "A public defender," Reza says.
It's no accident, then, that with these heroes Reza became a criminal defense attorney with the Washington, D.C., Public Defender Service. For four years he practiced "emergency room lawyering," as he calls it, learning the "realities of power, poverty and race, and the possibilities of dedication and perseverance."
After an almost two-year stint at a prestigious law firm in Washington, Reza made the switch to full-time teaching in 1999 when New York Law School came calling. It was the fulfillment of a dream, and also a kind of New York homecoming. "Ten, 15 years ago, it was my fantasy to be doing what I'm doing now," Reza says. And yet, he acknowledges that there have been some obstacles in his career. He wishes he could have applied himself sooner to achieve his aspirations. In some ways, he says, he feels like he "lost a few years after law school."
But that doesn't stop him now. Wanting to accomplish more, Reza maintains lofty goals--starting a family, for one thing. And bringing about social change, for another. "My interest is and always has been," he says, "to empower the disenfranchised, give a voice to the unheard, and identify those whom others have overlooked in the legal system and in everyday society."
Indeed, in order to achieve these goals, Reza says he wants to continue to teach, speak and write--and learn to do all these things better. Becoming an authority on issues important to him, such as Islamic law and the politics of the Middle East, is on the road to shepherding social progress.
Reza starts on that path with a simple thought. If he could sit down for a moment with Yasser Arafat, he would tell the Palestinian leader one short yet powerful word. A name, in fact.
"Gandhi." ###
(India Abroad originally published a shorter version of this article.)