Dr. Esmail Koushanpour, a leader in the Chicago-area interfaith, medical and peace and justice communities, died Feb. 12 at the age of 82.
“He was a very respected and beloved faith leader in the northern suburbs, when faith groups and labor unions began working together to build a base in the suburbs for the working poor,” said Joshua Hoyt, who founded, in 1997, of United Power for Action and Justice. “He brought not only himself, but the Muslim community into the struggle.”
Dr. Koushanpour had been executive director of the Islamic Cultural Center of Greater Chicago, a mosque at 1800 Pfingsten Road in Northbrook, from 2000 to 2008, and headed its interfaith efforts for 18 years.
He had been a researcher and physician in the field of renal disease, retiring in 1999 after 36 years on the faculty of the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, according to the Graduate Theological Foundation, where he served until recently as adviser to the Foundation on Islamic Affairs and distinguished service professor of American Muslim Relations.
A native of Iran, he emigrated alone at the age of 16 to England, where he studied at Oxford University, leaving for Columbia University in New York two years later, his wife said. He was a resident of Mundelein.
Dr. Koushanpour was the author of dozens of papers on the subject of renal disease and high blood pressure, and the co-author of a text on kidney science called, “Renal Physiology: Principles, Structure and Function.”
He had, as a graduate-school student at Michigan State University, designed a blood-pressure cuff for NASA that was placed on the tails of primates in the early days of space travel, according to his wife, Jenny Koushanpour.
“The concept was later used for a lot of other things, like the little thing they put on your finger to measure blood pressure,” the pulse oximeter, she said. “I think he sold that invention for $500.”
Hoyt said Dr. Koushanpour helped get Muslim leaders involved in the fight for health care for the poor in Illinois, leading to the formation of the Illinois Family Care program.
“He was a respected medical professional, and also a Muslim leader, who for two and a half years fought to get health care expanded for 180,000 people,” said Hoyt, now the national executive director for the National Partnership for New Americans, an organization tasked with integrating immigrants into society.
“He was my kind of interfaith person, who reached out personally to people,” said Debbie De Palma, another leader of the Northbrook Muslim community and local interfaith efforts.
“He would literally walk up to people’s doors who lived around the mosque to invite them in for an open house, and a lot of people came,” she said. “He was a socially skilled person and culturally astute.”
Dr. Koushanpour helped create interfaith programs for the mosque and several churches and synagogues, including Northbrook’s Beth Shalom and Glenview’s B’nai Jehoshua Beth Elohim, now in Deerfield.
He arranged for members of the then-new Northbrook Community Synagogue to use a mosque space for some of their services in 1995 and 1996.
“People of the Jewish faith and of the Muslim faith are cousins,” he said in 2002. “We really need to believe in that, and we need to explain that to people.”
Dr. John Paul McGee, a retired Glenview anesthesiologist, was a graduate student of Dr. Koushanpour’s almost 50 years ago.
“He was a valuable friend and mentor, someone who probably kept me from having many depressive thoughts about myself,” McGee said. “Working with him, I came out of it being a much stronger person.”
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Dr. Koushanpour’s view of interfaith relations was that it was useless to blame the bad behavior of individuals on their religions.
In speaking of the conflicts on Israel’s West Bank, he said in 2002, “That violence is terrible. My religion – it’s not part of it. The Jewish religion – it’s not part of it.
“If we can sit down and talk to each other, we can go places.”
He was active in the Northbrook Rotary Club and served on boards of the North Suburban YMCA, the International Center on Deafness and the Arts, the Gilead Outreach and Referral Center of Chicago, the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago and on the state of Illinois’ new Americans immigrant policy council.
He received the Bridge Builder Award from the Glenview Community Church and the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation’s Faith in Community Award.
Survivors include his wife, daughter, Kathryn Limon, and sons David, Philip and Stephen. Services were held the day of his death at The Islamic Foundation North in Libertyville, where donations in lieu of flowers may be sent.
Listen to Dr. Koushnapour speak here.
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