By Jan Pudlow
Senior Editor

When Asad Ba-Yunus was an assistant state attorney in Miami-Dade County, he was put in a unique bind when criminal trials fell on Fridays.

On Fridays, Muslim men must perform the weekend congregational prayer called the Jumu ?ah Prayer, and he would rush to a mosque in Kendall for the sermon and prayer that began at 1:30 p.m, and hurry back to court.

“We will ask judges to give an extended lunch,” explained Ba-Yunus, now a trial attorney practicing medical malpractice defense and general liability at Lubell & Rosen in Ft. Lauderdale.

“A lot of judges will let you do it and some judges find it peculiar. But it’s like going to church on Sunday for us.”

Another legal logistical hurdle arrives during Ramadan, when fasting is required during daylight for a whole month. At the end of the day, the fast is broken with prayer and a meal called the iftar.

Mostly, judges were accommodating, but sometimes a back-up judge assigned to a case would only take a five-minute recess if the trial continued into the evening.

“I would finish the trial starved,” Ba-Yunus recalled. “Sometimes, I felt bad stopping a trial, even before a judge I knew.”

Such are the challenges of being a trial lawyer and a Muslim.

Hoping to make it easier is part of the purpose of the newest of Florida’s 195 voluntary bar associations: the Florida Muslim Bar Association, the first and only professional organization for Muslim attorneys in the state. Ba-Yunus is president of the FMBA, serves on The Florida Bar’s Voluntary Bar Committee, and hopes to attend the Bar’s Diversity Symposium at the Annual Convention June 20.

“Of all the states, we have one of the most diverse populations of lawyers. We have a lot more exposure, and the Bar has to be more cognizant and adapt to the needs of minority lawyers and increase diversity, whether it’s the courts or the legal profession. If we don’t do it as an organization, we end up ignoring a very large section of our members,” Ba-Yunus said of the value of the Bar’s symposium.

The Florida Muslim Bar Association was originally called the South Florida Muslim Lawyer Network when it first formed in spring 2006.

“It started out as a social networking type of thing,” said Ba-Yunus, who said of its 50 members, 40 live and practice in Southeast Florida, and the other 10 are sprinkled around the state. They are reaching out for more members across Florida and their purpose is loftier.

Now formalized as a voluntary bar association and registered as a nonprofit trade organization, the FMBA has a Web site (floridamuslimbar.org) that posts this mission statement: “To strive to foster a community of legal professionals with the highest standard of integrity and honor, to promote the equal administration of justice, and encourage diversity in the legal system.”

The group’s objectives include “improving the position of the Muslim community at large by addressing issues affecting the local and national Muslim population, educating the local and national community about matters affecting the Muslim community, advancing and protecting the rights of Muslims in America, and creating an environment that helps guarantee the full, fair, and equal representation of Muslims in American society.”

That objective was put to the test in February when Attorney General Bill McCollum played a film for his employees called “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.” After Muslim civil rights groups expressed concern that the film portrays mainstream Muslims as potential terrorist threats, McCollum agreed to establish a Muslim community advisory group and reached out to the FMBA to help coordinate and participate in the group.

“We conveyed to the attorney general that the film ‘Obsession’ does not assist law enforcement in combating terrorism and in fact is counter-productive if relied upon to develop policy and counter terrorism strategies,” FMBA board member Khurrum Wahid was quoted in news reports at the time. “Those who have limited contact with Muslims may view all Muslims as suspect after watching this film. Working with the many patriotic Florida Muslims to get an accurate picture of Muslim Americans is a far more effective use of resources.”

The FMBA is also working with the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division on a project to help provide poll-watching and to report violations of federal election laws, Ba-Yunus said.

“In the Midwest, there was a post-911 backlash about Muslims at the polls,” Ba-Yunus explained. “There was a case where a person of Arab descent came to the poll and was told, ‘You have no business to vote. Your people attacked us.’ When you are born and raised here, and you are a voting citizen and want to participate in the process, it is very frightening to encounter that kind of thing from officials at the polls . . . . We will be in place for the presidential elections.”

Ba-Yunus has invited 11th Circuit Judge Scott Bernstein, chair of the Supreme Court Commission on Fairness and Diversity’s education subcommittee, to be the FMBA’s special guest at the group’s April 9 dinner.

They hope to work together on a curriculum for diversity training, such as judges not automatically assuming a wife in a divorce and custody case who wears a head scarf to court fits the image of an oppressed Muslim woman.

“I know Asad because he handled a few cases in front of me,” Judge Bernstein said. “I did come to learn that there was a [Florida] Muslim Bar Association, and I reached out to one of the other board members, who I know quite well, about including certain issues into diversity trainings. My thought was to begin a dialogue about issues, and then see if we could develop a short program to educate others about the concerns the Muslim Bar Association has, then, if it is successful, roll the program out to a wider audience.”

Judge Bernstein said he was looking forward to the April meeting, adding, “My general sense is that most folks don’t even know there is a Muslim Bar Association. Here I am chairing diversity education and I didn’t know one existed.”

Judge Bernstein does know what it’s like to be a judge asked to accommodate a Muslim lawyer for Friday prayers and fasting during Ramadan. Khurrum Wahid was an assistant public defender assigned to his courtroom when he was in the juvenile division.

“We didn’t set Khurrum’s cases for trial on Fridays. It was no trouble at all,” said Judge Bernstein.

“And during Ramadan, he couldn’t eat during the day. I made sure we would take a break at sundown to make sure he could eat. It’s not hard to accommodate someone when you know what the issues are.”

Bernstein says his upbringing has helped make him sensitive and accepting of others’ differences. His father was a diversity education teacher in the public schools for the Anti-Defamation League.

“Also, because I’m Jewish and I grew up in a community where the majority religion wasn’t mine, I know how uncomfortable it is to be in an environment where religious practices are not yours. In elementary school, I remember for the entire months of November and December, we sang songs about Jesus. I resented it even when I was in the third grade.”

In his role on the Supreme Court’s diversity education subcommittee, Judge Bernstein helped train 10,000 people last year.

“I just believe so strongly in this kind of education for lawyers and judges. My father would say, ‘Life is not fair.’ And that’s a hard lesson for a kid to learn. The legal system may be the only place to say it’s always supposed to be fair,” Judge Bernstein said.

Working for fair treatment for Muslim lawyers involves correcting false impressions.

Ba-Yunus, born in Ithaca, New York, and raised in nearby Cortland, hopes to shatter stereotypes about Muslims, especially fueled by fear in post 9/11 America. Among those misconceptions, he said, is that all Muslims are terrorists who hate the West and despise America in particular.

“That is like saying Fords are cars, but not all cars are Fords,” Ba-Yunus said. “For me, this is my home country. My mom and dad are from Pakistan, and for me, visiting Pakistan is visiting a foreign country. I come from a family of public service. We figure this is really our home.

“For me, domestic issues are more important than international issues, like Social Security and our economy and the credit crisis, all things that hit home. A lot of people don’t realize or accept it. They think we are here for another reason.

“Most of us, myself especially, are venomously against terrorism and violence. If I ever had the good fortune of meeting Osama bin Laden, I would wring his neck with my own hands. This is my country.”

A week after 9/11, Ba-Yunus flew from JFK Airport to Miami for his job as a prosecutor.

“I saw the smoke billowing from Manhattan and my heart completely sank. I wear a commemorative pin on my lapel for the paramedics who died that day. I used to be a paramedic myself for four and a half years. For me, it is very, very personal. When people out there pretend or assume that I, or someone in my community, had something to do with it, or could have prevented it, that really hurts.”

Ba-Yunus tells the story of prosecuting a defendant charged with a murder that happened two weeks before 9/11. That terrible day in history became a handy reference point for an alibi witness to remember a sequence of events while testifying.

“In closing argument, I had to apologize to the jury that I was not trying to use the memory of 9/11 in a bad way,” Ba-Yunus said.

“The judge scolded me for it. But looking like I look like, with an Arab-sounding name, I didn’t want jurors to misinterpret my words for being disrespectful.”

That difficult experience, he said, was one of the reasons that sparked the idea to form the group that has now become the Florida Muslim Bar Association.