With his job as the Department of Correction’s top Islamic chaplain hanging in the balance, the imam who equated the Bush administration with terrorism has retained a prominent civil liberties attorney to press his case with the city.

Issuing no apologies for his remarks to a Muslim students’ conference last year, Imam Umar Abdul-Jalil appeared outside a Harlem church yesterday with a former leader of the New York Civil Liberties Union, Norman Siegel. Mr. Siegel said he would meet this week with lawyers for the city and argue that Abdul-Jalil was speaking under free speech protections of the First Amendment.

“This controversy raises serious and substantial questions about the free speech rights of government employees to be able to speak up on issues of public concern,” Mr. Siegel said, adding that the courts have been “very clear” on the issue. “A government employee off the job speaking and discussing nonconfidential matters has a First Amendment right to engage in that speech. The courts have said that speech by a government employee is protected speech.”

The city suspended Abdul-Jalil last week after the New York Post quoted the imam as saying in a speech that the “greatest terrorists in the world occupy the White House.” Abdul-Jalil also reportedly said Muslims were tortured in a Lower Manhattan jail and urged American Muslims to “stop letting the Zionists of the media dictate what Islam is to us,” according to a recording of his speech obtained by the Investigative Project on Terrorism.

Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday that he has not made a decision about Abdul-Jalil but hopes to do so this week after considering the legal issues involved.

“Part of it is what I think is right, and part of it is what’s legal,” Mr. Bloomberg told reporters in the Bronx yesterday. “He’s a civil service employee, and I want to understand the law as well as understand exactly what he said and what his performance is, and then I’ll make a decision as to what I think is right.”

Judging by Mr. Bloomberg’s statements to this point, Mr. Siegel said he was “cautiously optimistic” that Abdul-Jalil would be able to keep his job.

Abdul-Jalil’s statements have prompted sharp rebuke from officials at organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League and the New York Tolerance Center, which questioned whether a figure with apparently extreme views should hold a leadership position in the city’s jails.

A former city prosecutor and the chairman of the City Council’s Public Safety Committee, Peter Vallone Jr., yesterday disputed Mr. Siegel’s argument in defense of Abdul-Jalil, saying the First Amendment could not be used to protect the imam. “Mayor Bloomberg would be on firm legal ground if he decided to terminate him,” Mr. Vallone said. “Until I hear an apology or an explanation, which I have yet to hear, I don’t believe that he should be someone who is counseling our most violent population.”

Abdul-Jalil, who spent more than 15 years in prison for selling drugs, has worked for the Department of Correction since 1993 and has served as director of ministerial services since 2004. Yesterday, he defended his work and noted that he campaigned for President Bush. When asked, the imam declined to clarify or elaborate on his statements from last year. “That’s not what today is about,” Mr. Siegel said, speaking for Abdul-Jalil. “There will be other opportunities, more appropriate forums to do exactly that.”

Religious leaders from the Muslim, Christian, and Jewish faiths stood alongside the imam yesterday. While defending Abdul-Jalil’s service to the city and asserting his First Amendment speech rights, many of the imam’s supporters largely steered clear of addressing the substance of his remarks, made at a conference of Muslim students in Arizona last April. A few, however, praised him for “speaking truth to power” and lashed out at his critics.

“There’s an old saying that truth shall make you free,” a deputy director at the correction department and the president of the Correction Guardians Association, the Reverend Lawrence Lucas, said. “The other side of that coin is that the truth shall get you in a hell of a lot of trouble with those who cannot deal with the truth.”

Rev. Lucas called Abdul-Jalil one of the most respected officials at the correction department and said he had “more spine than most of the folks in the Congress of the United States.”

The leader of the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood, Imam Al-Hajj Talib Abdur-Rashid, likened Abdul-Jalil to African-American and Muslim leaders of the past, including Malcolm X and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., whom he quoted as once saying that America was the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world.” African-American Muslim leaders, Imam Abdur-Rashid said, “practice nonviolent jihad with our tongues speaking truth to power.”

A Jewish correctional leader, Rabbi Baruch Leibowitz of Brooklyn, also backed Abdul-Jalil yesterday. “Umar is my friend, and I support him,” Rabbi Leibowitz said in brief remarks, adding that what was being said about the imam “defied the reality of who he is.”