When I saw Marwan Marouf’s face plastered on my Instagram feed, under bright red letters announcing he’d been arrested and detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the first thing I remembered was his distinctive, gentle voice.
For nearly three decades, Brother Marwan, as we know him, has been a constant presence in our community. Long before the Dallas area attracted thousands of Muslims and high-profile religious leaders, we grew up in small congregations, and people like Marouf led prayers and delivered short sermons to a few-dozen families now and then. He’d arrived in the city in the ’90s as a student, and he later worked as an engineer at the same company as my dad and some of my friends’ parents.
Once, in high school, during late evening Ramadan prayers, I fell asleep while he was giving a lecture, lulled into a sense of peaceful drowsiness. In the women’s section of the mosque, there was a running joke that the mics weren’t strong enough to amplify Marouf’s soft-spoken delivery. I remember being annoyed that I had missed most of his sermon, as he’d been coming around to our masjid less frequently, since there were dozens of them now to rotate between. His sermons were almost always uplifting reminders about how to live more compassionately and generously at a time when it felt like both these forces were dwindling in our society.
