Moved by 9/11, some Americans changed their lives

The stunning nature of the attack prompted Mr. Bruder to read about what was happening in Islamic countries so he could understand the motivation behind the strike. What he discovered was a "huge gap economically, a disparity [with the West] that was growing greater."

So he decided the best way to deal with the terrorism threat was to give people a stake in society. "Nobody throws stones through somebody else's window if they've got a window of their own," he says.

He hired the Brookings Institution to help him figure out the best way to begin addressing that gap. He also reached out to leaders in the political, foreign-policy, and business realms here as well as in the Islamic world. And he began to travel to places he'd never been before such as Afghanistan, Egypt, and Turkey. He discovered that the education systems "were not doing what they could be doing" and were not focused on job creation. Neither was US foreign policy in the region.

"We should be spending our money on books and not bombs. The money that we're putting into 'shock and awe' should be used for a Marshall Plan," he says. "That's how you marginalize the terrorists."

With $10 million of his own money, Bruder set up a foundation hoping to achieve just that. It now consumes 90 percent of his time. Initially, he thought he'd build primary and secondary schools, but his board, made up of many of the luminaries whom he'd reached out to, thought that would take too long. So instead, the Education for Employment Foundation is now focused on creating vocational and technical education. A year from now, the Egyptian Center for Nursing Excellence will open, with more schools on the way. "What I'm doing is a very small effort compared to what's needed," he says. "It will take billions of dollars, but it will pay the best dividends one generation down the road."

Joel Collins had worked the night shift at a power plant in Groton, Conn., and was sleeping on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. His brother woke him up to tell him about the attack. "I was just stunned," he said. "I knew this was not an accident. This was an act of terror that would affect the balance of power in the world."

Mr. Collins had been raised a Methodist. When he was in high school, an older brother had gotten involved with the Nation of Islam, but he didn't find it "agreeable." That was the extent of his contact with Islam until several years before the attacks. Then, through a Muslim friend whom he'd met on the Internet, he began to learn about the faith. At first he simply wanted to understand how it differed from Christianity.

"The more I read, the more compelling and convincing I found it. This faith answered a lot of questions that Christianity didn't for me," he says.

Then came 9/11, and the American media broadcasts were suddenly full of Islamic sounding names like Al Qaeda, bin Laden, and Mullah Omar. The more he watched the news, the more Collins felt that the religion he was growing to love was being linked, unfairly, with radicals.

At work, he started getting in arguments, defending Islam, trying to explain that it wasn't the faith that did anything wrong, but rather individuals. The more he found himself compelled to explain Islam, the deeper he felt his connection to it grow. Eventually, he converted and now goes by the Islamic name Hamza Ismail. "People at work were shocked, my friends were shocked, and my parents were shocked," he says.

This summer, Mr. Ismail became the civil rights director for the New England branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation's leading Islamic rights group. He now spends much of his free time working to help others understand Islam. "We all have to live in this country together," he says. "The only way we're going to continue to bring peace and harmony is to work together."

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