On the inside all I could think was, “Are you serious? Have you seen our community? A bunch of aunties and uncles who couldn’t do shit about Adnan or Gutierrez or any of this, who are too scared to challenge the police or the state, who told their kids to stay away from it all? Have you actually met our community, Sarah?”
I may have said some of this out loud, but I can’t remember. I do remember wondering in amazement, does Sarah actually think this woman legitimately has something to fear?
Fear or no fear, I swore internally, I’d figure out who wrote this tripe. Then I got back to the more important business at hand—that this memo was part of the official case file.
“You’re telling me this was in the police files? That this memo was part of the official file of the police and prosecution?”
Sarah nodded, not seeming to understand my incredulity.
The memo, dated August 24, 1999, began with the subject line, “Report on Islamic thought and culture with an emphasis on Pakistan. A comparative study relevant to the upcoming trial of Adnan Syed.” It was addressed to Detectives Ritz and MacGillivary. It consisted of seven confusing and confused pages of random, and often irrelevant and unrelated, facts, conjecture, and purely invented kookery positioned as serious analysis. It covered, among other things, the following:
• “The Salafa”—that is, the generation of Muslims who lived at the time of the Prophet Muhammad
• The role of death in Islam
• A brief summary of the Shia-Sunni difference and divide
• Pakistan’s political and legal systems, religious laws, ethnic groups, demographics, suffrage, agriculture (why, just why?), statistics on the condition of women in Pakistan (birth, education, crime)
• Shariah—specifically, religiously regulated criminal punishments
• Gender norms, veiling, women’s roles, clothing
• “Sexual Attitudes,” which included such reprehensible lies as stating that a reasonable option for a strict Muslim family, if one of its men engaged in pre-marital relations with a non-Muslim woman, would be arranging for her death.
I had no doubt that the writer was a complete bigot and quack-job posing as an Islam expert; I had come to know such people well through my work, which was spent trying to counter their damage. And this “expert,” fifteen years ago, had provided the police with “research” to tie Adnan’s religion and ethnicity to the crime.
I read another portion of the ridiculous document out loud, feeling my face heat up:
“Clearly Mr. Syed faced almost insurmountable odds to meet with this ‘infidel or devil’ in secret. Ownership is not outside of his cultural belief system. After giving her a veil, literally covering her so that only he could have her, he set her apart from all others and for him alone. For all intents and purpose he marked his territory by giving her a gift of great value within his culture and in doing so he sealed her fate with his.”
I looked up at Sarah, my eyes bulging.
“What is this about?”
Sarah replied cautiously, “Well, apparently Adnan bought Hae a scarf from an Islamic conference he attended with this father.”
It took a few seconds for me to make the connection.
Sarah continued.
“I mean … is it true?”
“Is what true?” I shot back, not wanting to accept that she had asked what I thought she had just asked.
“Is it true that when a Muslim man gives a woman a scarf, he owns her or it’s like some kind of ownership?”
I don’t know if I was jumping up and down in rage at that point, but at a minimum I must have been rocking back and forth, given my difficulty at hiding my temper. I remember getting up, still furiously flipping pages, glaring at her and Dana.
“You’re kidding me, right? You’re not actually asking me if that’s true?”
Sarah stayed quiet.
“Oh my God, it’s not true. You know that, right?”
She didn’t look like she knew it.
At that point I had to balance my anger at the memo itself with my angry disbelief that someone as bright, educated, and sophisticated as Sarah could even entertain the thought that anything in that toxic, bigoted memo could be true. But I shouldn’t have been so surprised; I had, after all, spent the last decade fighting these very lies about Islam and Muslims that have become the normative narrative in the United States.
If the cops and prosecutors thought the memo was accurate, there was no reason Sarah wouldn’t.
* * *
Since that terrible September morning in New York and D.C., when nineteen Muslim hijackers slammed commercial planes into the crowded Twin Towers and the Pentagon, killing thousands, Muslims in America have felt besieged.
It is not by accident that half of the states in this country have either introduced or passed “anti-Shariah” legislation, a fact that may come as a surprise to those who still think the First Amendment applies to everyone. It is also no accident that neither conservative nor liberal parties welcome Muslims into their ranks. And it is completely by design that public bashing, humiliation, and outright reviling of Islam and Muslims is par for the course in the media and among our political leadership. Islamophobia is a bigotry everyone is comfortable with.
And there’s a reason for this. A dedicated, well-funded, dynamic cottage industry of “Islamophobes” and anti-Muslim bigots has been operating for years under the guise of research, academia and policy-making. In 2011 the D.C. think tank Center for American Progress published a landmark report called Fear, Inc. It traces, in painstaking detail, the millions of dollars that annually support the very strategic creation and dissemination of misinformation about Islam and Muslims to policy makers and media and the grassroots and state-level legislative organizing against Muslims.
The impact of the work of this industry is no joking matter. Their influence has led to numerous Congressional hearings on the “radicalization” of American Muslims and a veritable witch hunt of any American Muslim engaged in policy or government work. In 2009 a group of U.S. legislators called for an inquiry into Muslim high school and college interns on the Hill, accusing them of infiltrating Congress and demanding that the Department of Justice open an investigation. A poll taken of Republican primary voters in 2015 showed that 72 percent felt a Muslim should not be allowed to be president and 40 percent felt that Islam should be outlawed writ large in the nation. A March 2016 poll showed that in all states where presidential candidate Donald Trump was the GOP frontrunner, nearly 65 percent of Republicans polled felt Muslims should be banned from the United States.
Well known and widely followed “liberals” like Bill Maher have persistently attacked Islam and Muslims; while Maher dislikes religion in general, he holds a special place of contempt in his heart for Islam, calling it the “mother lode of bad ideas.”
A study by the firm Hattaway Communications found an interesting divide when it came to conservatives and liberals on the issue of Muslims and Islam: both groups generally tend to mistrust or dislike our faith group, but for different reasons. Conservatives consider Muslims a security threat, conflate Muslims with being foreign (a reason much anti-Muslim organizing is closely tied to anti-immigrant organizing), and question their loyalty and patriotism. Liberals, on the other hand, mistrust Muslims for their perceived treatment of women, religious minorities, and the LGBT community.
Either way you slice it, a lot of people don’t like us. And it shows.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has been tracking the anti-Muslim industry and its impact for a number of years now. In a July 2011 piece they noted:
The American public psyche has undergone a subtle but profound metamorphosis since 2001, moving from initial rage at the 9/11 mass murder to fear of another devastating attack by Muslim extremists to, most recently, a more generalized fear of Islam itself. That evolution from specific concerns to general stereotyping is the customary track of racism and xenophobia—and in Muslims, those inclined to bigotry
may have found their perfect bogeyman.
But it would be a mistake to think everything was just fine for Muslims in the United States before 9/11.
It absolutely was not.
* * *
In the early 1990s, I was sitting on the Boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland, with my best friend and siblings in tow. I was sixteen, Saad was ten. We were enjoying the last bit of summer and chowing down on Burger King as the sun went down. My dad and my best friend’s dad, who also happened to be close childhood friends, had given us some cash and wandered off. The first thing I did was make a beeline to get my beloved BK chicken sandwich.
I actually saw the group of grizzled, tatted biker-looking men coming from about a hundred feet away. I assumed they would just walk by our little gaggle of brown faces. But they headed straight for us and I remember feeling slight panic as they got closer, instinctively protective of my brother and sister.
There were three of them, wearing black leather vests and sunglasses that blacked out their eyes. They stopped right in front of us and I looked up, frozen with a mouth full of my sandwich.
“Go home you fucking sand niggers, back to aye-rack.”
I felt the contempt in every word—he may as well have spat at us—and my face filled up with blood and humiliation. Not the least because I wanted to say, “You asshole, we are from Pakistan, not Iraq.”
They were well out of earshot when I broke out of my frozen terror, stood up trembling, and yelled something like “go to hell!” I knew they couldn’t hear me, but I couldn’t let my siblings think I just let that happen without a response.
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard the words “sand nigger” in my life. Once, while in middle school, as I stood in the front yard of our little home in Hagerstown, Maryland, a van pulled up and the door slid open. A group of white teenagers leered out yelling “fuck you sand niggers!” and zoomed off.
That was my introduction to the idea that some people didn’t like Muslims.
The first Gulf War deepened that sense when one of my teachers jokingly asked if Saddam Hussein was my uncle.
The early nineties brought us the highly popular film Not Without My Daughter, which came to define Muslim family dynamics for the West. To this day, over two decades later, I’m still asked by kindly old grandmothers at churches and synagogues where I guest lecture to address the implications of this movie.
“I know how Muslim men treat their women. I saw that movie, Not Without My Daughter.”
“Why are Islamic countries so oppressive to women, like in that movie?”
“I feel terrible for you honey, the things you have to go through as a Muslim woman.”
Thanks, Sally Field.
Today 80 percent of all media stories about Muslims in the United States are terrorism related.
Journalist and author of the Fear, Inc. report Wajahat Ali sums it up like this: “Culture is a powerful force that influences our perceptions, our mindsets and even our domestic and foreign policies. The rich, messy complexity of 1,400 years of Islamic civilization and 1.6 billion Muslims has been reduced to token stereotypes. We are either avatars of destruction or the good Muslim who helps the national security narrative. But the overwhelming majority of us live in the giant middle—the grey zone—where impressions exist in more colors than just black and white.”
* * *
I knew all about anti-Muslim fear and stereotypes in the United States already, but it still didn’t prepare me for this memo, which turned out to be written by Mandy Johnson of the Enehey Group, the same person brought in by Hae’s uncle to help investigate her disappearance in January of 1999. This memo was written almost nine months later, long after Adnan had already been arrested. It wasn’t written for the police investigation, it was written for the State’s prosecution.
Some revelations are a long time coming. This was one of them.
The Enehey memo finally brought clarity as to why the police focused so strongly on Adnan, even from before it was known that Hae was murdered, and why prosecutors kept bringing up his religion throughout the case.
The narrative of the angry Muslim man worked for detectives; it fit neatly with their existing biases. During her investigation Sarah would end up speaking to a few of the jurors who confirmed our fear—that Adnan’s religion and ethnicity were indeed factors considered by the jury.
One juror, remembering back to the deliberations, told Sarah, “I don’t feel religion was why he did what he did. It may have been culture, but I don’t think it was religion. I’m not sure how the cultures over there, how they treat their women, he just wanted control and she wouldn’t give it to him.” Another juror told Sarah that when the jury was deliberating, they discussed that in Arab culture it was the men who ruled, not women. It seems Gutierrez’s long, impassioned soliloquy on Adnan’s Pakistani roots did not clarify for the jury that he was not Arab. Adnan’s faith was actual evidence against him. The State had made sure of it.
* * *
Sarah’s investigation continued, with little information coming our way. Every so often I would ask her who she was speaking to. She mostly didn’t indulge my nosiness, though she did tell me that neither detective MacGillivary or Ritz agreed to speak to her. I knew at that point to keep a respectful distance and hope for the best.
One day, in late February 2014, the best that I could then hope for actually happened.
Sarah called me, excited. She had reported on another case, a wrongful conviction, a number of years earlier. That reporting had put her in touch with an attorney named Deirdre Enright, who headed up the University of Virginia Innocence Project.
Feeling perhaps a bit up against a wall, Sarah had reached out to her. They met and Sarah walked her through the case, showed her some documents.
The Innocence Project has been around for decades. In 1992, nationally acclaimed attorneys Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld co-founded the organization, which would go on to become a full-fledged nonprofit with chapters across the nation. Scheck and Neufeld, who have known each other since the mid-1970s when they were both public defenders, had been working with the newly emerging science of forensic DNA testing since the late 1980s. They based the Innocence Project on that work. Its purpose was singular: to exonerate wrongfully convicted and incarcerated people using DNA evidence.
To date they have helped exonerate nearly two hundred people across the country, including many on death row.
Adnan had twice applied for his case to be considered by the Innocence Project Clinic at the University of Baltimore. Both applications were summarily rejected for the same reason: the Innocence Project only worked on cases where potential DNA evidence existed—in Adnan’s case there was none.
When I moved back to the D.C. area I tried getting them involved too. I left a number of phone messages, which finally resulted in a brief conversation with the director. She said there was no point in meeting, they didn’t take cases like this.
Until Sarah met with Deirdre.
Deirdre shared the documents and story that Sarah brought her with her team, the law school student volunteers who were the machine that made her clinic run. They were immediately drawn in; something, they felt, was off. This story, the way the State told it, didn’t make sense to them.
“Deirdre said they would take the case.” Sarah marveled. We were both pretty amazed.
I made her repeat it, just to be sure.
“Can they?” she asked. “Are you ok with that, will Adnan be ok with that?”
* * *
But I didn’t understand one thing—how could they take a case that had no DNA to work with? I didn’t press the subject, though; I figured perhaps Sarah’s existing relationship with Deirdre influenced her to take the case, or maybe not all chapters operated the same way. Regardless, Sarah and I spoke to Adnan, his family, and Justin and got permission all around. After reviewing the files, Deirdre went to see Adnan with a few other members of her team and a Maryland attorney she would work with to han
dle local filings. In that meeting she told Adnan something none of us ever knew: that in fact samples that could have, and should have, been tested for DNA evidence had actually been taken from Hae’s body. But the prosecutor’s office had put a hold on testing.
Adnan was stunned, as was I. Could there have been physical evidence that would have not only cleared him fourteen years ago, but also helped to identify Hae’s killer?
I couldn’t fathom Gutierrez missing something as glaring and significant as potential DNA evidence, and numerous teams of lawyers had been through these documents since without comment. Eventually Sarah’s assistant sent me the files digitized on USB drives so I could take a look at what they found, but at that point I just was thankful that the IP team was going through everything with a fine-toothed comb.
According to Deirdre, those samples could still exist in a police evidence locker somewhere, and if they did, the test results could exonerate Adnan. The kinds of DNA testing available today can pick up traces that were undetectable in 1999, even in the samples the State said had no trace evidence. They could, of course, also yield nothing, no matches to anyone. For all of us the decision seemed clear—Deirdre had to find those samples and compel the State to test them.
But a storm was coming our way. In that moment we had no idea what Sarah was creating. I anticipated an hour-long This American Life radio broadcast, summarizing her findings, whenever she finished up her investigation. At some point over the summer she mentioned that the story would likely be told in parts, maybe six episodes, maybe ten.
Either way, I didn’t care too much. The only thing that mattered to me was finding the smoking gun that could clear Adnan. So far, the closest thing that came to it was the possibility that DNA testing clearly implicated someone else.
* * *
By August I was beginning to feel low. We hadn’t heard back from the Court of Special Appeals on our appeal of the PCR denial, no witness had crumbled and come forward with exonerating information, and I was starting to second-guess whether I should have taken this case to the media. For the past ten months I had juggled work, family, and managing our end of whatever was required for Sarah’s investigation. The story wasn’t even public yet and I was tired. It’s no secret that I cry easily, but those days the tears were just under the surface. I was terrified of failing Adnan, once again.
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