Many US military bases have rooms set aside for Muslim prayers, and at least two military facilities have their own mosques. In 1992, the Saudi Arabian government donated founds to transform an office at Fort Eustis Army Base in Newport News, Va., into a mosque. And in November 1997, about a year after Noel’s chaplaincy appointment, Norfolk Navel Station’s mosque opened in a complex that also houses a synagogue and two Christian chapels. “I thought it was an important thing to do that our Muslim sailors have the same type of religious support that our Christian and Jewish sailors were being afforded,” said Capt. John N. Petrie, the former base commander who now is assigned to the chief of naval operations at the Pentagon. “About 70 percent of the 1.4 million active-duty US military personnel have voluntarily declared a religious preference,” said Lt. Col. Tom Begines, Defence Department spokesman. Of those 4,000 have identified themselves as Muslims, up from 2,500 in 1993.
Because of a common reluctance to publicly state their religion, Air Force Master Sgt. Talib Shareef, president of the recently formed Muslim American Military Association (MAMA), estimates that there may be as many as 10,000 Muslims in the armed forces. These include American-born converts such as Noel, who is from Salem, N.J., and converted to Islam in 1989, and immigrants such as Navy Capt. K.M. Mohammad Shakir, who was born in India. Shakir, a US citizen since 1978, is programme director for endocrinology training at the National Navel Medical Centre in Bethesda and was on the physicians’ team that treated the then-president Bush’s overactive thyroid condition.
