NEW YORK (AP).- Eight years ago, Sharif El-Gamal was just another ambitious striver from Brooklyn, casting about for career leads and dreaming of a grander future in real estate. A handful of modest deals later, he’s sitting on one of the most politically charged projects in recent city history: a plan to build a 13-story Islamic cultural center, health club and mosque 300 yards from the World Trade Center memorial. At age 37, El-Gamal now finds himself being castigated daily on network television as everything from an insensitive agitator to an Islamic supremacist. The whirlwind has, by all appearances, caught him by surprise. El-Gamal referred interview requests for this article to his publicist, who said he needed more time to gather information. In the few interviews he has done, he has insisted that when he set out to buy a building for the YMCA-style center four years ago, he never gave a thought to its proximity to ground zero. Even after criticism of the project moved fr