By Nora Connor

At first, Andrea Elliott’s New York Times series “An Imam in America” seems to offer an opportunity, rare in newsprint, to witness a religion being practiced rather than hearing it explained. Based on six months of interviews with Sheik Reda Shata, an Egyptian immigrant and imam of the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, Elliott’s three articles are a string of scenes and anecdotes intended to paint a picture of this religious leader in action and, by extension, the life and the faith of his congregation.

As the protagonist of a melting pot drama, Shata is almost too good to be true: from a rural village with no electricity, lost his mother at an early age, “too poor to buy books,” memorized the Koran and became a star student at Cairo’s Al Azhar University — in other words, a recognizable American type, a Horatio Alger hero on the Nile. And in the first article, “A Muslim Leader in Brooklyn, Reconciling Two Worlds,” he emerges as a sort of stern-but-reasonable authority, who knows his Voltaire as well as his Koran, and shuns the movie theaters of America but loves the orderly inclination to obey traffic laws.

It’s in the second act that things get a bit messy. Entitled “To Lead the Faithful in a Faith Under Fire,” the second entry in the series addresses the obvious question of how Shata copes with demands from law enforcement agencies that he monitor his congregants for signs of terrorist activity, and the task of mediating the mutual hostility between them. The piece is a point-counterpoint checklist of the controversial issues, told entirely through the imam and top law enforcement officials: Imams are under unfair scrutiny from law enforcement, but after all, a few of their number have been convicted in terrorist plots. The FBI says relations are “very positive,” but still there’s a suspicious “wall of silence” around these mosques. Shata has praised Hamas leaders and at least one Palestinian suicide bomber, but he condemns violence against civilians. He understands the frustration of Muslim youth, who feel harassed, isolated and rejected, but he urges them to embrace America, “still the freest country in the world.”

Shata’s position is unenviable. Elliott writes that the mosque’s board of directors is largely Palestinian, and his congregation is largely Arab, immigrant, and in her own framing “under fire” in their new country. It’s likely that regardless of their content, the imam’s comments on matters relating to terrorism, surveillance, Israel, and Islamic theology will be unsatisfying, controversial or offensive to big constituencies either within or outside the Bay Ridge Islamic Society. The article reveals Shata employing what is probably the only plausible strategy available to him, that of preaching openness, at least publicly, giving a nod of understanding to anti-Muslim attitudes in the U.S., and staying away as much as possible from the subject of Palestine. Elliott is reporting on the performance, and there’s a distinct feeling that she got the official tour. Because we don’t hear directly from any of these at-risk young men or women who have made a social or political return to Islam, we’re not getting any new insights, just the same list of frustrating conditions reasserted.

Cuteness rules in the third article in the series, “Tending to Muslim Hearts and Islam’s Future,” about the sheikh’s renown as a matchmaker. We tag along as Shata chaperones dates, filling in for the extended family network that performs matchmaking roles in many immigrant Muslims’ home countries. Human folly abounds. One man complains about a prospective match’s flat chest, and another woman wonders aloud whether her date is an alcoholic. Matchmaking is a welcome activity for the imam, because its problems seem surmountable.

Which makes it an ideal conclusion to the narrative arc. In the first article, we encounter our sympathetic hero; in the second, we encounter conflict; in the third, we find resolution. Or do we? Shata’s bigger problems remain, of course, and Elliott wins her happy ending only by substituting a de-politicized personal for the plainly political reality of a Muslim community leader in America. The public-relations feel of the series reaches a peak here. Elliott writes that the imam “offers long, stubborn theories about the value of marriage.” Instead of elaborating on them, though, or taking them seriously enough to consider them within the context of current cultural debates about marriage, Elliott devotes a dozen paragraphs to a sugary-sweet domestic scene that seems designed to illustrate that the imam loves his wife and kids. “When he walks in the door,” she writes, “his face softens. Loud kisses are planted on tender cheeks. Mohammed squeals, the girls smile, sweet laughter echoes.”

Set in a story that understands Shata as part of a community — with other members of that community appearing as characters — such details would be admirable. Elliott is one of the few major daily reporters who’s been attuned, in the past, to the nuances of and variations in Islamic life in America. Her past work has even been a model of how to report a group of people, instead of one protagonist. But given major front page space over three days, she has collapsed those complicated narratives into a conventional, character-driven plot. Scenes are stretched to bear a burden they can’t support. That is, they are asked to serve as elements in a “bigger” story, which appears to be something about “East vs. West.” What’s wrong with a story that’s “just” about Bay Ridge, in all its Islamic complexity?

We’re told that Shata’s congregation consists mostly of immigrants from Middle Eastern countries (Yemen, Palestine, Egypt) but that there are also Albanians, Moroccans and Pakistanis. Now that’s interesting. Not many congregations can boast that kind of linguistic and national diversity — how does it all function? Who translates for the Albanian couple that comes to see the imam about their marital problems, and what of the “often-clashing Islamic traditions” that are mentioned and then never taken up again? With a school, a community center, and a 20-year presence in the neighborhood, the Islamic Center of Bay Ridge has a long history, but a lot of potentially interesting material gets overlooked in the rush to flesh out the bullet points in the Clash of Civilizations Cliffs Notes.

Brooklyn is presented as some kind of breaking point for Islam. Fiqh, or jurisprudence, we’re told, is built on 14 centuries of scholarship, “but imams in Europe and America often find this body of law insufficient to address life in the West.” Apparently during those first 1400 years, Muslim legal experts never had to deal with social change or cultural phenomena that proved challenging to their theology.

Enough with the oral sex and sports bras. Are the temptations of the “West” really so new, either to Islam or to Shata himself? The Times articles make it seem as though none of the imam’s congregants in Germany, Egypt or Saudi Arabia ever ate a Big Mac or interacted with scantily clad women. Are we really to believe that Muslims the world over remained unaware of the existence of oral sex for the past 1400 years?

“Time and again,” Elliott writes, “Mr. Shata’s new country has called for creativity and patience, for a careful negotiation between tradition and modernity.” Time and again, Times readers are encouraged to see religion as the static (“traditional”) half of a binary temporal equation. The other half of that equation is just as tritely posed in the first few sentences of the series: The West, in the Bay Ridge of rattling trains, littered sidewalks, neon signs, huddled Mexican workers and gypsy cabs. Big, bad New York City.

Nora Connor is a journalism graduate student at NYU.