Excerpt:
The two men behind the proposed Islamic community center and mosque near ground zero are from different generations and distinct backgrounds — the imam, 61, grew up in England and Malaysia and immigrated to New York as a teenager; the real estate developer, 37, spent his early childhood in Brooklyn, then attended American schools overseas.
The imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, is cerebral, soft-spoken and sometimes otherworldly. The developer, Sharif el-Gamal, is businesslike, brash and sometimes pugnacious.
Each has his own public relations firm and behind-the-scenes advisers. They have individual — not always identical — visions for the project, which they occasionally call by different names: the imam still speaks of it as Cordoba House, a name laden with religious history, while the developer uses the less-charged Park51. And amid the swirling controversy about their shared mission, they sometimes give different answers to thorny questions.