Among them were the motivations that had prompted the Muslim-cultural Students Association (McSA) to invite Haleem to discuss these topics at their major spring event.

“I understand that your motivation was relevance,” Haleem told the McSA members in the audience. “You want to appear pertinent, to discuss an issue that your colleagues on campus could relate to… But these topics selected you rather than the other way around.”

Since Islam’s stance on abortion, homosexuality and stem cell research is “rather straightforward,” Haleem said. “The real question you have to answer is ‘Who cares?’”

Haleem continued with an acerbic critique of the “mainstream American culture” that he said “cares only about calling into question our legitimacy as a faith community.” American society doesn’t care about the Muslim perspective on issues such as stem cells, Haleem said.

“The only cells America is interested in with regards to Muslims are the terrorist cells,” he said.

Haleem went on with a five-minute list of wrongs he said the federal government and American society committed against Muslims at home and in Iraq since Sept. 11.

But “9/11 was not the crisis,” Haleem said. “It simply catalyzed the crisis and ushered us… into a fight for the soul of America.”

Haleem, facing a restless audience, said he could not speak “like a neutral, as one who has not come to certain beliefs, certain convictions.”

He said that the issues McSA had wanted him to speak about were “irrelevant” in light of the broader crises facing America and the world. The solution, Haleem said, was for people to live up to the “Quranic objective of knowing each other, so that we can overcome an inborn human weakness, namely the inclination to hate others whom we do not know.”

Muslims should not be “presenting Islam as a legalistic, issue-by-issue contention,” Haleem said during the question-and-answer session that followed his speech. “We should be presenting the core message of Islam.”

Haleem’s standpoint drew mixed reactions from audience members, including McSA leaders.

“I was surprised but at the same time I was enlightened”, said Medill sophomore Hibah Yousuf, the co-president of McSA. “This speaker was someone we put a lot of trust into, and I think the McSA learned as much as the rest of the audience.”

Yousuf said she was disappointed Haleem did not address the topics of homosexuality, abortion and stem cell research because “they are ways people cast their vote and decide whom they are going to identify with or what kind of person they are going to be.”

Weinberg junior Nathan Zebrowski said he would also have liked Haleem to express his point of view on these questions.

“He did not communicate Muslim teaching,” Zebrowski said, “and I think it would be unfair to consider Islam in the light of what he said.”

However, Yousuf said that the unexpected speech had in some way achieved McSA’s objective, “which is to initiate dialogue between our group and the greater Northwestern community on some topics that are not really discussed because they are considered to be taboo.”

Yousuf hoped students would reflect on those sensitive questions and Haleem’s perspective during a follow-up meeting that McSA will host on Thursday, May 24.

The day Weinberg freshman Lyzanne Trevino and two of her friends decided to start a kite club at Northwestern, they were flying a kite into the March breeze on the South Campus beachfront.

“We had just found this kite for $2 at CVS,” Trevino said. “It was a big Barbie kite, the last one they had at the store.”

The following day, Trevino and five other fellow kite enthusiasts were discussing the idea on the second floor of Allison Hall, where they all live. The club officially started in early April and hosted its first kite-flying event, Afternoon De-Kite, on the south campus beach Thursday.

Of the 28 people that showed up, Trevino said she was very hopeful most of them would join the club and help it get a strong member base.

“All the people I talked to were enjoying themselves and were very excited to learn more about the club,” Trevino said.

Now the club’s president, Trevino said she has been focusing on recruiting new members and getting the T-status, or ASG recognition, as early as next September.

“The club started more as a joke than anything else,” Trevino said. “We were thinking, ‘No one actually wants to sign up for a kite club.’”

To Trevino’s surprise, 20 people have already signed up for the club and now she is counting on ASG recognition to attract 30 more members by the end of fall quarter.

“We want to be able to advertise in Norris, get a table to recruit people from all over campus and maybe have an exhibition to show kites we bought or built ourselves,” Trevino said.

After the Barbie kite’s string broke last month, each member of the executive board donated between $10 and $15 to buy 10 new kites. “But joining the club doesn’t cost anything,” Trevino said. “Showing interest is enough.”

According to a very pleased Trevino, last Thursday’s Afternoon De-Kite was a success.

“It’s also a first step towards recognition,” Trevino said, “because to get T-status you have to host an event and prove to ASG that it’s not just you and your friends and that you’re actually trying to reach out other students.”

Weinberg freshman Patrick Dawson, who was co-president of the club until he was elected to the executive committee of ASG, said it doesn’t take long for people to learn the basics of kite flying so they can then enjoy the peaceful activity.

“It’s just calming, relaxing, especially once you get it up in the air really far, you can look at it and not worry about it any more,” Dawson said.

According to Dawson, the hardest thing to do is to find people interested enough to take action and really get involved in the club. “I was surprised to see how much work you have to do to start a club like this,” Dawson said.

Trevino insisted that the event was only the first stage and that the club still had a lot of projects ahead, such as kite-building contests.

“We have someone on the executive board who is in charge of education and who is looking at how we could build our own kites,” Trevino said. “We’ve bought the material but it’s really harder than we thought it would be because there’s a lot of math and science.”

The club is also trying to develop outreach programs for students in other universities who are unable to fly kites because it is illegal in downtown Chicago.

Although Trevino had no idea that she would be the president of a college kite club at the beginning of her freshman year, she said her goal was to improve and expand the club before she leaves Northwestern.

“The people who started the club are mostly freshmen now, so we can be in it for the next three years,” Trevino said. “If we get the T-status at the beginning of fall quarter, we might later get the B-status, which will allow us to get funding from the university and organize other events like charities in the future.”

To meet this need for quality research, the PAS initiated the Research Alliance to Combat HIV/AIDS (REACH) four years ago, a collaborative program with the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. Despite ongoing prevention initiatives, Nigeria has the third-highest number of HIV cases in the world after South Africa and India. That fact prompted the formation of REACH, Joseph said at a PAS colloquium on April 20, titled “How Can Nigeria Reduce HIV Transmission?”

Last December the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gave PAS a $3 million grant.

“This three-year grant is the result of several years of conversations with the Gates Foundation,” said Joseph, the principal investigator for REACH. “Gates made a very decisive move to focus on prevention, because a lot of attention was devoted to treatment while people were still getting infected.”

REACH, will mostly be conducted in Nigeria by Nigerian researchers. It aims to produce knowledge and recommendations to initiate better HIV/AIDS-prevention strategies and help policymakers stop the spread of the epidemic.

“With all the programs that have gone into Nigeria, there’s only seven percent of people actually tested for HIV/AIDS,” said Nkem Dike, the project’s coordinator. “REACH is not just another HIV/AIDS research program. We will use community-based and social science methods to go to communities and find out why people are not getting tested.”

Joseph also described the Research Alliance as an asset for the university.

“REACH is a project Northwestern should feel good about because there is this terrible crisis in Africa and this is a contribution that we can make as a research community,” Joseph said. “The program will also provide a lot of opportunities for training of researchers, especially Nigerian, and when it is established and ongoing, provide opportunities for Northwestern faculty, graduate and undergraduate students to get involved in various ways.”

So far, the group has concentrated its efforts on background research in Nigeria.

“The researchers have traveled to various parts of the country to find out which NGOs (non-governmental organizations) were doing HIV/AIDS work there and what kind of gaps REACH could fill,” Dike said. “We hope that by June, we will be able to go to the field, produce results within a couple of months and have them published soon after.”

According to Dike, understanding the dynamics of HIV in Nigeria requires more than biomedical research.

“With scientific studies you can find out statistics, percentages of people who think that using condoms is important, but not why [that] despite this knowledge, they are not using them,” Dike said. “Nigeria is a very diverse place and what works for one community may not work for another. Using social science methods can really help us understand this.”

The alliance has identified two approaches for the conduct of community-level studies. One, a “longitudinal” approach, will take place during two years in two large communities. Another will be a cross-sectional survey of clinical prevention services across the country, initially beginning with three sites.

Joseph said that the first time envisioned this project, he could hardly imagine how challenging it would be.

“Of course, nobody willingly takes on Nigeria if you don’t know what you’re doing and what you’re getting into,” Joseph said. “Nigeria is a really big and populous country that has suffered a lot in terms of institutional development, and nobody had ever done this kind of project before.”

According to Joseph, the grant could be the first stage of a longer and wider project.

“By the time the program is fully operating, there might be at least 30 people involved at different levels,” Joseph said. “We are hoping that if we are reasonably successful, the Gates Foundation will not only want to renew its support but also increase it.”