Ever since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Dr. Farouk El-Baz has played an important role in educating Boston University students about the Muslim religion and helping to ease some of the worries of Muslim students.
“Because of my religious Muslim background I felt a responsibility to explain to both Muslim and non-Muslims at BU what the real Islam was all about,” El-Baz said.
El-Baz, a research professor and the director of Boston University’s Center for Remote Sensing, said he was personally shaken by the experience. He was out of the country when he first heard of the attacks and frantically tried reaching his eldest daughter, who lived only two blocks from the Twin Towers.
“My wife and I couldn’t reach her for a day-and-a-half after the attacks and were very concerned, but we were relieved to find out that she was OK,” El-Baz said. He returned to the United States on Sept. 15 and immediately began addressing issues facing the Muslim community.
“I knew there would be a lot of apprehension after this ordeal and that it would be hard for people to function in the aftermath,” he said.
El-Baz emailed members of the Arab and Muslim community at BU and organized weekly informal meetings for people to gather and discuss the Muslim religion and issues that have arisen in the Muslim community since Sept. 11.
“The first thing I did was to let everyone know that the people who did the attacks were a bunch of hoodlums that did not represent Islam and were on a political agenda rather than a religious one,” El-Baz said.
El-Baz’s meetings drew large numbers of Muslims and non-Muslims interested in learning more about the religion.
“I was amazed to discover that a lot of the students who attended were American kids and the American kids asked most of the questions,” El-Baz said. “I was happy that more of the BU student body was being exposed to the Muslim religion.”
In addition, El-Baz, called “the King” by many of his colleagues, spoke at BU’s Martin Luther King, Jr., commemoration on Jan. 20, explaining to members of the BU community how King’s messages can be applied in the aftermath of Sept. 11.
“We should reflect on Sept. 11 and remember what he said about religious tolerance and see what we can do now [to establish the] new normalcy,” El-Baz said. “King called for us to continue discussion and give up hate.”
El-Baz said he feels terrible the attacks were perpetrated by people from his religious background. However, he said the terrorists weren’t following any of Islam’s teachings when they attacked the United States.
“My father was a religious leader and I have been a Muslim all my life and I was taught the real religion instead of [what] the terrorists preach, so I wanted to explain the religion,” he said.
In late January, El-Baz traveled to Los Angeles to receive the American Muslim Achievement award from the Islamic Center of Southern California.
“The Muslim Achievement Award came out of the blue,” El-Baz said. “I was just sitting at my desk when someone called and told me about the award. For a while I really didn’t want to go, but then the events of Sept. 11 gave new importance to the award and my wife insisted on us going to California to receive it.”
Tamveer Hussain, chairman of the Development Committee of the Islamic Center, said El-Baz was one of 400 Muslims recognized by the center this year for giving back to their communities. “Farouk El-Baz has been a leader in his profession for years and has achieved such a wide variety of accomplishments that his nomination for this award was unanimous,” Hussain said.
“The whole ceremony was beautiful and it was interesting to see that the Sheriff and District Attorney of L.A. were there,” El-Baz said. “The events of Sept. 11 gave extra importance to the award for everyone.”
Over the years, El-Baz has received numerous honors for his broad range of professional accomplishments. He helped land the first man on the moon, was a science adviser to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and even had a spacecraft in the show “Star Trek” named after him.
Born in Egypt in 1938, El-Baz received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Ain Shams University. He came to the United States in 1961 and earned a master’s degree from the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy and a Ph.D in geology from the University of Missouri.
El-Baz came to BU in 1986 and founded The Center for Remote Sensing, which conducts scientific research experiments in the fields of archaeology, geography and geology.
“I met with [then- President John] Silber and [then- Provost Jon] Westling and after they asked me how they should go about starting a Remote Sensing Center they [said], ‘Why don’t you come here and do it?'” El-Baz said.
The Center uses satellite images and sensors to study changes in the environment and the Earth’s natural resources. In 1997, NASA named the center a “Center for Excellence in Remote Sensing.”
“The research we are emphasizing right now is to use satellite images for the location of groundwater, especially in the places of the world where there is a great need for water, like desert areas,” El-Baz said. “We are doing a lot of work in North Africa.”
El-Baz said one of his most interesting professional experiences was estimating the total number of people who participated in the Million Man March in Washington D.C., in 1995. The government said around 400,000 people participated. However, Dr. Michael Guillen, a science editor for ABC’s “Good Morning America”, asked El-Baz to use aerial photographs to count the number of people at the march.
“He [Guillen] said that he had been offered the first 30 minutes of Good Morning America if we could get the numbers before the show; the problem was that the show was the next day,” El-Baz said.
El-Baz worked through the night with his students, applying computer techniques he uses to count sand dunes in the desert to analyze the photographs. El-Baz came up with a final tally 20 minutes before Good Morning America.
“Our final number was [870,000] people and we went on the show and presented our findings,” he said.
El-Baz found himself caught in the middle of a numerical debate when his numbers were disputed. After the show, he received a call from the organizers of the march requesting a recount and he had to repeat the process.
“This time we took a whole week to count in order to get the final number to be more precise,” said El-Baz, who announced to BU the final number: 837,000 with a margin of error of plus or minus 20 percent.
“We came up with around the same total and we used our own funds to try and show the nation that an educational institution can step in and solve problems.”
On March 1, BU announced El-Baz’s most recent honor. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for “selecting the landing sites for the Apollo missions and for pioneering methods of discovering subsurface freshwater from space observations.”
El-Baz first joined the space program in 1967, two years prior to the Apollo landing on the moon.
“My job was twofold: First, the selection of landing sites on the moon; second, the training of the astronauts in visual observation of photography,” he said.
El-Baz served as Supervisor of Lunar Science Planning for six years. In 1973, El-Baz was selected by NASA to be Principle Investigator of the Earth Observations and Photography Experiment on the first joint U.S.-Soviet space mission of July 1975. To honor El-Baz’s work training the Apollo astronauts, the television program “Star Trek: The Next Generation” labeled one of its space shuttles “El-Baz.”
El-Baz’s primary scientific work has been in the field of Desert Research for over 25 years. He has conducted extensive research on deserts in China, Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Sultanate of Oman, the Rajasthan of India and Egypt. In 1978, El-Baz was appointed science advisor to Sadat.
“Sadat had a vision of expanding the living area of the people of Egypt because they lived in the confines of the Nile region and were dealing with population expansion problems,” El-Baz said. “My job was to help Sadat expand the population into the Desert region.”
El-Baz explored various regions in Egypt and devised projects to harbor natural resources appropriately. His work demonstrated how variations in the global climate influenced the evolution of arid lands.
While he has received numerous awards throughout his career, El-Baz said he treasures his 1999 honor from the Geological Society of America the most. The Society established “The Farouk El-Baz Award for Desert Research.”
“The award is special to me because it encourages arid land studies, which has been a main focus of my research and it also is given annually to researchers who work hard in the field,” El-Baz said.
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