Dov Hikind, a state assemblyman from a heavily Orthodox Jewish section of Brooklyn, told The Jewish Week of New York at the time that “the addition of Dr. Afridi and the expansion of the center’s mission diminish the magnitude of the Holocaust as a defining Jewish event.”

In the subsequent months, Dr. Afridi said, some Muslims called her a “Jew lover.” More troubling to her are the persistent rumors in Muslim circles that her scholarly work is being secretly funded by Jews.

Raked by those hostile crosswinds, Dr. Afridi keeps her address and the names of her family members confidential. Nothing, however, had led to self-censorship in her role as a public intellectual, she said.

“I have the empirical, existential understanding of my subject matter,” she said. “And I have the belief that if you speak for another, it means more than if you speak for yourself, for your own people. And when there’s so much daily tension between Muslims and Jews, it’s momentous for us to do this work, whether it’s me with the Shoah, or it’s a Jewish scholar speaking out about the Muslims in Bosnia or about Palestinian suffering. We are commanded by God to speak the truth.”

However divinely directed, Dr. Afridi had to make her own, idiosyncratic way. The child of a relatively secular banker and his more religious wife, she was raised in Pakistan, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, England and Switzerland before coming to the United States in 1984 for her last two years of high school. She attended a school in Scarsdale, a suburb of New York with a large Jewish population. She was one of few Muslims in the area, and her introduction to interfaith relations involved being roughed up by her soccer teammates and hearing her parents being insulted.

Nearly a decade later, while pursuing a master’s degree in religious studies at Syracuse University, she served as a teaching assistant to Alan L. Berger, a professor specializing in Holocaust literature. Sensing her curiosity, he urged her to visit Israel, and she spent five weeks there in 1995, ostensibly to study biblical archaeology.

Under that guise, she threaded her way through Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and the Palestinian territories of the West Bank. The experience magnified her interest in both Islam and Judaism. Along one axis, she earned a doctorate in Islam and religious studies from the University of South Africa. Along the other, as a visiting professor of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles from 2003 to 2005, she began recording oral histories of Holocaust survivors.