"My name is Islam" he said, seated on a metal folding chair just outside the doorway of an unmarked storefront in a small 3rd Street strip mall. The handwritten sign "Remove Your Shoes Before Entering" and the tattered Koran in his hand were the only indicators that the dimly lit shop, sandwiched between a busy Mexican Mercado and an Indian restaurant, was actually a Muslim place of worship.
The name he gave not only represented his desire for anonymity, but also the way he chose to identify himself in a city as culturally and religiously diverse as Los Angeles. Wearing a plaid shirt and weathered khakis with his bare feet against the pavement, the soft spoken grey-bearded man told the history of the religion that had shaped his entire existence, a religion that, for him, had no correlation to the carnage that had recently taken place at Fort Hood.
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