By Jan Pudlow

MIAMI, FLORIDA – When Asad Ba-Yunus was an assistant state attorney in Miami-Dade County, he was put in a unique bind when criminal trials fell on Fridays.

On Fridays, Muslim men must perform the weekend congregational prayer called the Jumu’ah Prayer, and he would rush to a mosque in Kendall for the sermon and prayer that began at 1:30 p.m, and hurry back to court.

“We will ask judges to give an extended lunch,” explained Ba-Yunus, now a trial attorney practicing medical malpractice defense and general liability at Lubell & Rosen in Ft. Lauderdale.

“A lot of judges will let you do it and some judges find it peculiar. But it’s like going to church on Sunday for us.”

Another legal logistical hurdle arrives during Ramadan, when fasting is required during daylight for a whole month. At the end of the day, the fast is broken with prayer and a meal called the iftar.

Mostly, judges were accommodating, but sometimes a back-up judge assigned to a case would only take a five-minute recess if the trial continued into the evening.

“I would finish the trial starved,” Ba-Yunus recalled. “Sometimes, I felt bad stopping a trial, even before a judge I knew.”

Such are the challenges of being a trial lawyer and a Muslim.

Hoping to make it easier is part of the purpose of the newest of Florida’s 195 voluntary bar associations: the Florida Muslim Bar Association, the first and only professional organization for Muslim attorneys in the state. Ba-Yunus is president of the FMBA, serves on The Florida Bar’s Voluntary Bar Committee, and hopes to attend the Bar’s Diversity Symposium at the Annual Convention June 20.

“Of all the states, we have one of the most diverse populations of lawyers. We have a lot more exposure, and the Bar has to be more cognizant and adapt to the needs of minority lawyers and increase diversity, whether it’s the courts or the legal profession. If we don’t do it as an organization, we end up ignoring a very large section of our members,” Ba-Yunus said of the value of the Bar’s symposium.

The Florida Muslim Bar Association was originally called the South Florida Muslim Lawyer Network when it first formed in spring 2006.

“It started out as a social networking type of thing,” said Ba-Yunus, who said of its 50 members, 40 live and practice in Southeast Florida, and the other 10 are sprinkled around the state. They are reaching out for more members across Florida and their purpose is loftier.

Now formalized as a voluntary bar association and registered as a nonprofit trade organization, the FMBA has a Web site (floridamuslimbar.org) that posts this mission statement: “To strive to foster a community of legal professionals with the highest standard of integrity and honor, to promote the equal administration of justice, and encourage diversity in the legal system.”

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