From NBC News
Having come home late from work, his wife and two sons already asleep, Adeel A. Mangi was changing for bed one night in December 2015 when an email came across his phone.
The message, from a friend at the Muslim Bar Association of New York, said there’d been a problem with a group in New Jersey that was denied permission to build a mosque, according to Mangi, a litigation partner at Manhattan law firm Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP.
It also asked if he’d be interested in talking to them and possibly taking on the case.
“I thought to myself, ‘boy it’s going to be really hard for me to take on something new and big right now,’” Mangi said. “So I tapped out an email response to him saying, ‘I wish I could, but I’m just so busy right now.’”
But then Mangi paused and deleted his reply.
“I wrote it again, and I deleted it again,” he said. “And then I thought about it for five minutes — still standing there half dressed getting ready for bed — and then I said, ‘Look, I’m really busy right now, but if they want to meet, tell them I’d like to meet.’”
Mangi and a litigation team at his firm wound up representing the Islamic Society of Basking Ridge pro bono in a federal religious discrimination lawsuit they filed in March 2016 against Bernards Township.
The suit — along with a second one brought by the Department of Justice — accused the New Jersey township of caving to anti-Muslim animus in the community and discriminating against the society in denying its years-long bid to build a mosque.
