For the past five years, Qaseem A. Uqdah, a Marine Corps veteran, has been visiting military bases around the world in search of Muslim officers and enlistees who might make suitable chaplains.
In his role as a recruiter, Mr. Uqdah is not employed by the military. Instead, he is an independent middleman who runs a group that is authorized by the Pentagon to nominate Muslim chaplain candidates. He said he is paid nothing for his efforts and is motivated by his belief in Islam.
One of the clerics Mr. Uqdah recommended to the Pentagon — Capt. James J. Yee, a Chinese-American convert to Islam and a graduate of West Point — is now locked in a brig in South Carolina as government officials investigate whether he engaged in espionage while ministering to Muslim prisoners at the military camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
"I wholeheartedly believe in his innocence," Mr. Uqdah said. "I would never abandon my chaplains, but if I believed Yee was guilty of something, then I would say something."
Neither military nor civilian authorities have brought formal charges against Captain Yee, but after his arrest the Pentagon says it has begun a review of the admittedly ad hoc process it has used for years to select and train chaplains of all faiths.
Whether the chaplains are Christian or Jewish, Muslim or Buddhist, the military relies on religious groups themselves to recommend and to educate their own candidates. The military says that because of the constitutional provisions that govern the division of church and state, only churches and religious organizations can ordain or appoint their own clergy.
With Muslim chaplains, however, this has proved particularly problematic, especially since Islam has no centralized hierarchy. Most other faiths and denominations have a single authority responsible for chaplains, like the Roman Catholic Archdiocese for the Military Services. But in the absence of such an equivalent Islamic authority, the military has relied on grass-roots Muslim groups.
"Because of the separation of church and state, and the decentralized nature of Islam, we are dependent on loosely affiliated Islamic groups to certify the credentials of Muslim clergy in order for them to apply to be chaplains in the military," the Pentagon said in a statement.
After more than 10 years of accepting the recommendations of Muslim groups, the military says it will now re-evaluate the requirements for individual chaplains and the religious groups that nominate chaplain candidates to the military.
The military says the review was not prompted by the arrest of Captain Yee. But there is no question that the arrest brought the chaplaincy process under fresh scrutiny.
Mr. Uqdah and another person who did not want to be identified said some Muslim chaplains had told them that they had recently been pressured by military intelligence officials to share information about Muslim military members. Information that military chaplains learn in counseling sessions or in confession is supposed to be confidential.
Two senators — Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona — have begun a Senate investigation into how the government chooses Muslim clerics, or imams. Mr. Schumer has been saying for at least six months that the Muslim groups now responsible for choosing and training chaplains are all affiliated with a militant form of Islam popular in Saudi Arabia that some call Wahhabism.
"The people who believe in Islam should have a right to a chaplain of their own religion," Mr. Schumer said in an interview. "But what the military has done is taken a narrow, fundamentalist and extreme band of the spectrum and said those groups have a monopoly on who becomes an imam in the military."
While Mr. Schumer contends that the groups that are currently or were previously involved in the chaplaincy process have a common purpose, they are in many ways rivals of each other. American-born and foreign-born Muslims said in interviews that they were suspicious of the other, and even among the groups dominated by Middle Easterners, there are disagreements.
But leaders of the Muslim groups interviewed on Friday, and several scholars who study Islam in America, said Mr. Schumer was engaged in a witch hunt. The leaders said they would welcome any review by the military because they are confident it will prove that they are not Wahhabis, are loyal to the American government and have served the military well.
"If I was a Wahhabi or a religious fundamentalist, I don't think I would have the relationships I do with the military right now, nor would I have spent 21 years in the military," said Mr. Uqdah, an African-American convert to Islam who was a Marine Corps gunnery sergeant.
Yvonne Haddad, a professor of history of Islam and Christian-Muslim relations at Georgetown University, said Mr. Schumer was getting bad advice about the theological and political affiliations of the Muslim groups he cites and had thrown the net of suspicion too wide.
"They are not Wahhabi," Professor Haddad said. "For people like Senator Schumer to make a blanket judgment is just ludicrous."
The first Muslim chaplain was commissioned in the Army in 1993, and there are still only 12 in the American armed forces — seven in the Army, three in the Navy and two in the Air Force, the Pentagon says.
Military chaplains must be nominated by a "certifying agent" with a religious organization approved by the military. There are two religious organizations now approved to nominate Muslim chaplains. One is the Islamic Society of North America, a large umbrella group based in Plainfield, Ind. The other is Mr. Uqdah's group, the American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council, which is based in Virginia and, he said, operates on such a shoestring that he had to take out a second mortgage on his house to keep the organization afloat.
The chaplain candidates are also vetted by the military: they must meet age, height and weight requirements, pass a physical and a background check to qualify them for a security clearance.
They must also have a bachelor's degree and at least 72 hours of graduate education in religious studies and related disciplines. For Muslims, this has proved an obstacle. There are no well-established and fully accredited graduate schools or seminaries devoted to Islamic learning in the United States. Many imams in the United States are trained overseas, and in mosques without a cleric, laypeople often lead the prayers.
Most of the Muslim chaplain candidates received their graduate training at the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences, a small school in Leesburg, Va., that was trying to win accreditation as a center for Islamic higher education. The graduate school did not train Captain Yee — who studied Islam in Syria — but it did provide him with a letter testifying that the courses he took at a Muslim school in Syria were equivalent to what he would have received at their institution, a school spokesman said.
In March 2002, the graduate school was among about two dozen Muslim groups, most in Northern Virginia, that were raided by customs agents, who said they were looking for evidence of terrorist financing.
Another group raided by custom agents last year was the American Muslim Foundation. The foundation is run by Abdurahman Alamoudi, who says he became the first Muslim certifying agent for the military in 1991. Mr. Alamoudi, who turned his responsibility for certifying chaplains over to Mr. Uqdah several years ago, was criticized by some as an anti-Israel extremist after he was filmed at a rally in front of the White House several years ago shouting a pro-Hezbollah slogan.
Since the raids, no charges have been filed against the graduate school, the foundation or the other Muslim groups.
"That raid was ill-advised, inappropriate and has led to nothing," said Nancy Luque, a lawyer for the graduate school. "And the reason is, we have no connection to terrorism or terror financing."
The school remains open and has retained the military's sanction to educate chaplain candidates. But for at least two years, no chaplains have chosen to be trained there, Ms. Luque said.
Now, most Muslim candidates study at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, which also trains chaplains for hospitals and prisons. The Hartford Seminary once specialized in preparing missionaries, but now houses a center for Christian-Muslim relations. There are at least two Muslims now studying at the seminary in preparation for military chaplaincy, one of them a woman, several sources said. But Mr. Uqdah questioned whether the students would drop out after all the scrutiny following the arrest of Captain Yee.
"Why would they want to go through all this?" he said.