“When you think about Muslims, you typically think of an Arab or South Asian, but if you were to take a random Muslim out of America, odds are they would be black,” says Rafee Al-Mansur. “African-Americans are the largest Muslim racial group in the U.S., at more than a third of the Muslim-American population, but most people don’t seem to realize it—including other Muslims.”

As part of their Woodrow Wilson fellowships, Al-Mansur, a senior sociology major, and classmate Mohamed Hamouda, a biology major, are producing a documentary film about African-American and immigrant Muslim communities in the Baltimore region.

Rafee Al-Mansur (left) and Mohamed Hamouda ’13 work on editing their film about Muslims.

The two communities tend to exist in their own separate worlds, note Al-Mansur and Hamouda, with African-American mosques mainly located in the city and immigrants—and their mosques—in the suburbs. They share the same religious beliefs, but like many separate ethnic groups, tend to keep to themselves. “I don’t think the immigrants really know how to relate to the African-American community,” says Hamouda. “I don’t think it stems from racism, it’s just a cultural thing. Jokes that are funny to them might not be funny to the other group and vice versa.”

Al-Mansur and Hamouda hope their documentary helps change that paradigm. The pair has been filming interviews with both African-American and immigrant Muslims, getting interviewees—from religious leaders to teenagers—to talk about their respective communities. They’ve had subjects share stories about topics ranging from family life to jobs to relationships to the histories of the communities themselves. Their goal is to edit all the interviews into a film that reveals the dynamics of each community. Then the Wilson fellows would like to screen the film for both groups, with the purpose of helping each one understand the other a little better. “Hopefully,” says Al-Mansur, “we’ll also be able to facilitate some connections between the two. Our ultimate goal is to inspire change, not just to do research.”

Both students are second-generation immigrants. Al-Mansur’s parents hail from Bangladesh, and Hamouda’s mother and father come from Algeria and Libya, respectively. Part of the film, the students say, will cover their own journey of discovery as they complete the project. Despite being the child of immigrants, Al-Mansur says he’s found that, in many ways, he can relate to African-American Muslims more than he can to the first-generation immigrants. “I grew up here in America and have experienced a lot of the same things they have,” he says. “I do think that provides hope that maybe second-generation immigrants can bridge the gap between these two communities.”

Both say they were also surprised by the devotion to Islam practiced by African-American Muslim converts—a devotion often stronger than that they witnessed in the immigrant communities, where people are more interested in fitting into American society. “It’s almost like African-Americans are on this journey to becoming Muslims, and immigrant Muslims are on this journey to becoming American,” says Al-Mansur. “But both communities can offer each other a lot. African-Americans are American. They know this country the best and could help immigrant communities with assimilating into America. At the same time, these immigrant Muslims have a lot of knowledge about Islam they can share with black Muslims.”

Both students say it will take time to help unite two disparate groups facing very different challenges. “When we go to these mosques in each community, we can see that the Friday congregational sermons are very different,” says Hamouda. “The needs of an inner-city teenager facing the problems of gangs or drugs can be very different from those of an immigrant teenager. They’re in different situations, and they have to combat different struggles.” But in the end, he says, “what holds us together is that we all testify to the same Islamic declaration of faith: There is no god but God, and Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) is His messenger.”

How do socioeconomic conditions affect life expectancy? Do people in countries with nationalized medicine live longer? How does happiness affect one’s lifespan? Does aid provided to developing nations really help in lengthening people’s lives?

These were some of the questions Omar Haque set out to explore as part of his Woodrow Wilson Fellowship project. The senior pre-med student has spent much of the past year studying the effect of economic forces on human life expectancy by traveling throughout England, France, South Africa, and Greece. Later this year, he plans to visit Japan and Singapore.

“I wanted to see if there were socioeconomic reasons why people live longer, so I chose countries that ran the spectrum of the health care system—from European countries with socialized medicine to South Africa, which has a large income disparity,” he says.

Haque says that while it’s long been apparent that people in the richest countries live longer than those in the poorest countries, that’s not due to the amount of money spent on health care. For instance, he notes, life expectancy is higher in Great Britain and France than it is in the United States, even though the U.S. spends the most money on health care in the world.

Being a pre-med student, Haque wanted to visit the countries he was researching in order to observe their health care systems firsthand. As part of his qualitative study, in each country Haque familiarized himself with the economics of health care delivery—how doctors get paid, how medical funds are allocated, and how health insurance practices are carried out—while also interviewing college professors, students, and other locals about their country’s economies and health care systems.

While studying the economics of global health care at Oxford University, Haque found that doctors in the U.K. usually work for a salary, versus the fee-for-service system used in the United States. There are advantages and disadvantages to both systems, Haque notes: long waiting lists to see doctors in Britain, who tend to request far fewer tests than their colleagues in the United States, where physicians get paid according to the number of tests they conduct.

“The theory behind fee-for-service in the U.S. is that you’ll conduct a lot of tests to cover all your bases and the patient will get better. But the problem with that theory is that it doesn’t affect life expectancy,” says Haque, referring to work done under Maria Alva Chiola of Oxford’s Health Economic Research Center, with whom he studied. “More lives are lost because of lack of access to health care than [because of] a test that isn’t conducted,” he says.

Haque also delved into the work of National Geographic writer Dan Buettner, who has identified “Blue Zones” around the world—places that have the greatest life expectancy and where more people reach age 100 than anywhere else. Haque learned that access to expensive medical treatments had little to do with extended life expectancy. Instead, he says, living longer has more to do with family ties, a strong belief in something, living your life with a purpose, and a healthy amount of exercise. “These are not normally things you associate with living long; you associate them with being happy,” he says. “But the two are very closely linked.”

When he traveled to South Africa, Haque saw firsthand how violence, a lack of doctors, and high rates of HIV contribute to the country’s average life expectancy of 49.3, according to United Nations data. And he learned that despite years of foreign aid to help combat HIV, the disease is still spreading.

In South Africa, Haque conducted a series of conversations with Ruthira Naraidoo, a professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Pretoria.

Both she and Haque advocate establishing micro-level, community-based health programs where economic and cultural subtleties can be addressed. “We need to leave our desks and gather information on how these places work,” he says. “Only by being there can you learn how to help.”

Haque hopes to earn a medical degree from Hopkins and possibly work for a global health organization, like Doctors Without Borders or the World Health Organization.

“I want to make a difference in people’s lives,” he says. “I want to improve health care in the U.S. and around the world.”