The man in charge of recruiting Muslims to support Barack Obama resigned from the campaign on Monday -- just nine days after being appointed -- when an Internet newsletter revealed the man was on the board of an Islamic investment fund on which a fundamentalist imam also sits.

Mazen Asbahi, the campaign's volunteer national coordinator for Muslim American affairs, said he was quitting to prevent creating an appearance problem for Obama.

"In 2000, I agreed to serve as a member of the board of trustees of the Dow Jones Islamic Index Fund. I served on that board for only a few weeks before resigning as soon as I became aware of public allegations against another member of the board," Asbahi wrote in an e-mail to the campaign that was released Wednesday.

"Since concerns have been raised about that brief time, I am stepping down from the volunteer role I recently agreed to take on with the Obama campaign as Arab American and Muslim American outreach coordinator in order to avoid distracting from Barack Obama's message of change," he wrote.

Asbahi, a corporate lawyer at the Chicago firm of Schiff Hardin LLP, was brought into the campaign to do outreach to Muslims in key battleground states, including Florida, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia. According to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the resignation, the campaign has been trying to balance the perceived disparity of having outreach efforts for Catholics, evangelical Christians and Jewish voters but not for Muslims.

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