Moment in Convention Glare Shakes Up Khans’ American Life.
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How
Khizr and Ghazala Khan, parents of a soldier killed in Iraq, came to
challenge Donald J. Trump and reshape a presidential campaign.
Capt. Humayun Khan’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery.
Six minutes and one second. That was all it took for the 66 years of Khizr Khan’s life to become an American moment.
It
was not something that he could have anticipated. For years, he and his
wife, Ghazala, had lived a rather quiet existence of common obscurity
in Charlottesville, Va. He was known in circles that dealt with
electronic discovery in legal proceedings. Another overlapping sphere
was the rotating cast of cadets that passed through the Army R.O.T.C. program at the University of Virginia. His wife was a welcoming face to the customers of a local fabric store.
And the last dozen years for the Khans were darkened by their heartbreak over the death of a military son, Humayun,
whose body lies in Arlington National Cemetery, his tombstone adorned
with an Islamic crescent. Their grief brought them closer to a
university and to a young woman in Germany whom their son loved. It also
gave them a conviction and expanded the borders of their lives.
Some
of their neighbors knew Mr. Khan liked to carry a $1 pocket
Constitution around with him. In the Khan home, a stack of them always
lay at the ready. Guests showed up and they were handed one, in the way
other hosts might distribute a party favor. Mr. Khan wanted it to
stimulate a conversation about liberty, a cherished topic of his. He
liked to point out that he lives nearly in the shadow of Monticello,
home of one of his heroes, Thomas Jefferson. Mrs. Khan liked to say, “We
need Thomas Jefferson.”
And
then the Khans stepped into a sports arena in Philadelphia and left as
household names. In a passionate speech at the Democratic National
Convention, the bespectacled Mr. Khan stingingly criticized Donald J.
Trump and his stance on Muslim immigration, scolding him, “You have
sacrificed nothing and no one.” Quickly enough, both Khans felt the verbal lashings of Mr. Trump, the Republican presidential candidate.
And just like that, they found themselves a pivot point in the twisting drama that is American politics.
Goals Set Forth
This
is another moment in the lives of Khizr and Ghazala Khan. In 1972, he
was studying law at the University of the Punjab in Lahore, the largest
public university in his native Pakistan. He was intrigued by Persian
literature. Learning of a Persian book reading, he went. Ghazala was the
host.
Photo
The University of Punjab’s old campus in Lahore, Pakistan, in 2011. Ghazala and Khizr Khan met at a book reading she hosted when he was studying law at the university.
He
was raised in Gujranwala in Punjab Province, the oldest of 10 children.
His parents had a poultry farm. “My life was very ordinary,” he said in
an interview this week. “There was nothing special. I grew up as every
other Pakistani. No extra earth-shattering events took place during my
lifetime, and we were modest people.” But, he said, he had the ambition
“to keep moving forward.”
The
university reading was one thing, but what enchanted him was the host.
She was from Faisalabad and was studying the Persian language. He
engaged in some decorous maneuvering and decided that she was the woman
he wanted to marry. He enlisted the help of his parents, who reached out
to her parents. Then the real courtship began.
In
1973, he graduated from law school and he was licensed with the Punjab
bar in 1974. Already, his goal was to move to the United States.
“Everybody’s dreams come true if you are able to study and complete
higher education abroad,” he said. “That’s the plan we grew up with:
that it makes your future better if you have a postgraduate degree from
overseas, England or United States.”
But
he did not have enough money. And so after the Khans were married, they
moved to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. For three years, Mr. Khan
worked for an American oil field company as the lawyer who handled the
affairs of the expatriate workers. Their first two sons were born,
Shaharyar and Humayun.
In
1980, the Khans came to the United States. First, they went to Houston
to save up more money. The four of them squeezed into a $200-a-month
one-bedroom apartment.
Once
he had the savings, he enrolled at Harvard Law School. He graduated in
1986 with a master of laws degree and became a citizen, as did his wife.
They
moved to Silver Spring, Md., and he found work reviewing mortgage
documents. It was not his dream job, but a third son, Omer, had been
born. Mouths had to be fed.
In
time, he moved on to several large law firms, where he specialized in
the emerging area of electronic discovery. It involved finding
information that was stored electronically to answer discovery requests
from opposing sides in lawsuits.
Robert
Eisenberg, a consultant who is a pioneer of the field, came to know Mr.
Khan well and found him highly proficient at his work and immensely
likable. “There is an old-world gentility about him,” he said. “He has
this veneer of formality. But under it is kindness.”
And so the Khans settled in, and they became an American life.
A Protector Against Bullies
There
are different vantages from which to understand the Khans’ middle son,
Humayun, and one of them is through Amir Ali Guerami. He was born in
Iran and he happened to come to the Maryland middle school that Humayun
attended. There were few Muslims, and that made Mr. Guerami different.
And he was very overweight. He was taunted and beaten up. His middle
name was Patrick. As he walked down the school hallways, bullies would
bellow, “Fat Rick.”
And
Humayun would hear this and step in. He would walk alongside him, a
sentry staring the bullies down, deflecting them. And he intervened when
Mr. Guerami was being roughed up outside the library. When he was
punched in the throat in gym class and could not breathe.
This
cemented a friendship that continued throughout high school. Humayun
was Mr. Guerami’s defender and his motivator. He urged him to exercise
and to diet. And after his sophomore year, Mr. Guerami was 60 pounds
lighter.
As a high school student, Humayun swam and played basketball, and he taught swimming to children with disabilities.
In
his middle son, Mr. Khan saw the traits of his mother — farsighted and
“much more balanced in her thinking and gestures.” “I’m a little more
emotional and shortsighted,” Mr. Khan said. Mr. Guerami saw this, too.
“You always knew he had a plan,” Mr. Guerami said. “He wasn’t just
stumbling through life like the rest of us. He was planning college from
Day 1.”
They
lost contact after high school. Mr. Guerami now lives in California and
owns a mortgage company. He was watching the Democratic convention when
the video came on about Captain Khan. And that was when Mr. Guerami
learned that he had been an R.O.T.C. cadet at the University of Virginia
and had joined the Army and had gone to Iraq and become a hero. That
his life was frozen at age 27.
The
memories returned. “He had an impact on my life,” he said. “You read
about kids being bullied in school and then their hurting themselves. He
owed me nothing, a complete stranger. Yet he stood up for me. He was a
savior.”
Love in Germany
A
German woman named Irene Auer sat down in a cafe in the Bavarian town
of Amberg, and a man approached her. This was another moment in the life
of Humayun Khan.
He was stationed in the barracks at nearby Vilseck. This was 2002.
She
liked his manner, and she especially liked his English. ”There were
many who spoke English very badly, or with a lot of slang, but not him,”
she said. “He spoke beautiful English and had a very beautiful voice.”
They
started dating. In time, she began studying international management
but stayed with him in his apartment off base on weekends. His mother
went to Germany in 2003, and the two became acquainted. In September
2003, Ms. Auer flew with Captain Khan to the United States to meet his
father. This was serious stuff.
Captain
Khan loved to have a good debate with Ms. Auer, her family and her
friends. One of his favorite topics was the meaning of life.
As
it happens, she opposed the war in Iraq. But he accepted his duty and
was proud to be a soldier. “Once he even said to me, ‘You know that I am
married,’ ” she said. “I asked him, ‘What do you mean you’re married?’
and he told me, ‘Yes, I am married to the U.S. Army.’ ”
On Feb. 9, 2004, he left for Iraq.
They
planned to get married the following year and eventually settle in the
United States. His intention
was to go to law school. In one of the last
emails she received from him, he told her to go pick out an engagement
ring.
A Captain’s Kindness
It
was his day off but he was not much for days off. He was the commander
of the Force Protection
Team of the 201st Forward Support Battalion,
First Infantry Division, at Camp Warhorse in Diyala
Province, Iraq.
Sgt.
Crystal Selby, one of the team’s drivers, went to pick him up that
morning. June 8, 2004. He said
he wanted to check the compound’s gate.
On a day off? She told him to stay in his room. He was
her boss. She
could not order him to, and he got in.
It
was funny how she had known Captain Khan only a couple of months and
yet it seemed like she had known him so much longer. It was the way he
treated her and all of the soldiers. “He didn’t talk to
you like he was
in charge of you, but like a friend,” she said. “He taught you how to be
better.
Not better tanker or better fueler. Better human being.”
He
made sandwiches for his soldiers when there was no time to get to
lunch. He had such an easy
sense of humor. “I read where someone called
him a soldier’s officer,” she said. “To me, he was
a human’s human.”
The
drive took three or four minutes. She dropped him off outside the gate
and headed to the office.
An orange-and-white taxi carrying two suicide
bombers was creeping toward the gate. Captain Khan shouted for his men
to hit the dirt. That may well have saved their lives. He moved toward
the taxi,
trying to halt it.
Sergeant
Selby was still in the truck, not even to the office, when she heard
the explosion. When
she arrived, the news of his death was already on
the radio.
R.O.T.C. ‘Mom and Pop’
The
Army R.O.T.C. center at the University of Virginia is on the first
floor of the Astronomy
Building. The program is not large — a typical
Army cadet class commissions 10 to 20 people.
When you walk into the
offices, it is the first room on the left. The Khan Room.
There
are several pictures of Captain Khan. Clippings about him. One of his
uniforms. A letter
of condolence from the Seven Society, one of the
university’s secret societies. Memorial plaques.
The piece he wrote for
his commissioning. It is where who he was endures.
It
is a functional space, serving as a conference room, a place where
prospective cadets might get interviewed or meetings held. When it is
empty, cadets use it to study for exams.
A
few months after their son’s death, the Khans moved to Charlottesville,
where their other two sons
were living, so they could try to recover as
a family. Shaharyar, their oldest son, co-founded a biotech
firm that
Omer, their youngest son, works at.
The
Army R.O.T.C. program became a part of their restoration. Tim Leroux,
who was the commander
from 2009 to 2012 and retired a lieutenant
colonel, saw them as the “mom and pop of the department.”
It became one
of their rocks. They attended all its formal events.
At
the annual commissioning ceremony, Mr. Khan always spoke. When the
cadets took the oath,
he told them, they needed to think hard about
their pledge to defend the Constitution, to reflect on
what they were
pledging to defend, because his son died for that document.
And he would give each graduate one of his pocket Constitutions.
Then there would be an award presented, the Khan award, that went to that year’s outstanding
scholar-soldier.
“For
years, I’ve been telling people he’s the most patriotic person I’ve
ever met, and I’ve met quite a few,” Mr. Leroux said of Mr. Khan. “There
are people who will put on cutoffs of the American flag and say they’re
patriotic. Or they’ll put on bumper stickers — America, Love It or
Leave It — and say they’re patriotic. He has a much more profound idea
of being patriotic. It’s a complete understanding of what liberty and
democracy mean.”
Mrs.
Khan came to these commissioning ceremonies, too. They were hard for
her. Her grief over her son’s death reached deep. One day not long after
moving to Charlottesville, she stopped at a local fabric store, Les
Fabriques. She makes her own clothing and needed fabric.
Carla
Quenneville, the store’s owner, waited on her. Mrs. Khan told her the
story of her son’s death. “She said she came in because she was so
depressed and she said, ‘I have to get off my couch and stop crying,’ ”
Ms. Quenneville said. “She had cried for a solid year. And we cried
together that day.”
Ms.
Quenneville wanted to bring sun back into her life. She told her, if
she wished, she could spend time in the store, help out if she wanted.
And so she did. Pretty much every Monday, she began showing up and
assisting customers, giving them tips on the sewing machines that the
store sold. Since she prayed five times a day, she sometimes used a back
room to pray.
The
fabric store helped her mend her own life. The sorrow, though,
persists. “A new staff person comes on, she tells the story of her son,”
Ms. Quenneville said. “And she cries. She can’t get through this.”
There
was other healing to be done in the circle of their son’s life. When
Ms. Auer, the woman Captain Khan planned to marry, came to his funeral,
Mrs. Khan presented her with his favorite quilt. She asked her to return
it when she got married, so they would know she was happy again.
Two
years later, Ms. Auer was still adrift. The Khans invited her to stay
with them, and she did, from May until August 2006. “They said to me,
come, we need you here by us,” she said.
After
returning to Germany, she met a man who became her husband. They have
two daughters.
She realizes she should return that quilt.
Honoring a Legacy
It
was important to the Khans to know the R.O.T.C. cadets, really know
them, and so they began the ritual of the dinners at their house. There
would be one dinner each year for the freshmen cadets and one for the
seniors.
A
front room was filled with mementos and objects no parent ever wants —
the letter of condolence from President George W. Bush, the American
flag that had covered the coffin. Often, the Khans would show the cadets
the room for them to understand the magnitude of the step they were
taking.
“The
Khans didn’t become bitter when they lost their son or become angry
with the military,” said Joe Riley, a cadet who graduated in 2013. “The
exact opposite. They showed tremendous pride in us.”
He
remembered how Mr. Khan pulled him aside and told him how he felt
blessed to be in this country and how much he admired the American
military.
The
focus at these dinners would swivel to the cadets — who they were, why
they wanted to join the Army, what future they envisioned. As they
shared, Mrs. Khan, always the R.O.T.C. mom, would remind them to eat
their vegetables.
At
one dinner, he told of how he had pictures of himself as a boy wearing
an Army uniform and digging tiny foxholes on the farm he lived on in
Tennessee. As he got older, he just felt it was the correct thing to do,
the only thing to do. He said he felt that if you live in your country
and enjoy its wonders, you should give back. For him, the Army was the
way to fulfill that obligation.
His parents had a different view. When they learned of his plans, they did not speak to him for eight
weeks.
And, oh, how the Khans loved hearing this conviction in a young man, this resolute belief in guarding American democracy.
In
2011, Joe Riley won the Khan Award. He went on to become a Rhodes
Scholar and is now
stationed in Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, Wash., an Army
lieutenant.
A Crush of Attention
Everything
had happened in the space of a week, and it was so much. The Khans were
on “Meet the
Press” and “State of the Union” and “PBS NewsHour,” some
dozen news shows in all, fresh arrivals
in the political process.
All from the dominoes of chance. Months ago, Mr. Khan was quoted in an article in Vocativ,
an online publication, criticizing Mr. Trump’s position on Muslims.
When asked about Muslim extremism in the
United States, he recounted a
conversation with his older son about the need to root out “traitors”
among them. Seeing the article, campaign officials for Hillary Clinton
wanted to put his son in a video
to be shown at the convention, and then
asked the Khans if they wished to say a few words. And
now all this.
Mr.
Khan was on “Anderson Cooper 360” this week, and he seemed spent. He
said they would not become silent but they were withdrawing.
“I
will continue to remind you what your behavior for the whole year had
been,” he said addressing
Mr. Trump. “I am not going to continue to
appear on television. It is really disturbing because it is
emotionally
disturbing. It is family-wise disturbing.”
He told The Times this week that he was exhausted from talking to reporters and that it was harming
his health.
In
recent years, he had gone out on his own as a legal consultant. A few
days ago, he took down
the website promoting his law work. He said that
he was getting hateful messages and that he was
worried about it being
hacked. Insinuations were being made, that he was involved in shady
immigration cases. He said he has had no clients come to him for that
sort of work. He said he did commercial law, especially electronic
discovery work.
The
Khans had been one sort of family and now they are another. In the
fast-forward way that it can
happen in modern society, they have become
public figures. They were put up in Washington hotels
for their TV
appearances. People floated up to them on the street. Took selfies with
them.
They wanted to be themselves again, mingle with cadets and talk about sewing at the fabric store.
A
few days ago, done with a round of interviews in Washington, they
stopped at Arlington National Cemetery to visit the grave of their son.
Then they went home.For more News and Entertainments, follow Us at our Social Network :
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