I mentioned this to a friend, who suggested I speak to a religious or spiritual person who could give me some guidance, comfort, maybe some prayers to recite and meditate over. It just so happened that Shaykh Hisham Kabbani, an internationally known Sufi scholar, would soon be visiting the area—and my friend had the connections to get me an audience. I wasn’t completely comfortable with the idea, first because I never considered myself a Sufi, and second because I had never in my entire life really asked a religious leader for help like this. Despite my prayerful ways, that had never occurred to me.
Still, I wasn’t about to pass this opportunity up.
Two nights before my appointment, on the night of August 20, I had a dream. The next day I posted on Facebook about it with a picture of Adnan.
This is Adnan, my little brother’s best friend and like a younger brother to me as well. He has spent over 15 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. He was 17 when arrested, is 32 now. He is serving a life sentence for a murder he is innocent of and recently lost his last appeal.
For 15 years we waited for the system to work but it failed. Now the only thing left is a public campaign to reopen his case. For the past 10 months I’ve been working with a journalist to investigate his case and a series of 10 radio shows will air this fall about it. I recognize without a corresponding grassroots effort the shows will not be enough to pressure the state to reopen the case.
Last night I was discussing my emotional exhaustion with a friend and spiritual mentor, talking about whether I have the energy for the sustained push it will take to acquit and free him. I went to bed feeling demoralized.
As I slept last night I dreamt I was driving and ran out of gas. It was nighttime and I was alone. I got out of the car dejected and upset and looked around, only to realize I was within walking distance of my destination. I could see it. It was right before me.
In the dream my destination loomed right around the bend, literally a huge sign towering in the sky, all lit up. I just didn’t realize how close I was when the car came to a stop in the dead of nowhere.
The dream began with fear and ended with utter relief from all my anxiety. The message it sent was clear: I might be out of gas, exhausted, but the destination was right in front of my face and I needed to start walking. Two days later I went to see the Shaykh.
Shaykh Hisham is a small man who wears a large white turban, and he has a long flowing beard to rival any childhood Father Christmas fantasy. He looked at me with a bit of a twinkle in his eye as I walked in, full of trepidation. He rose to greet me, which I found endearing—in our culture elders do not rise to greet those who are younger or less authoritative. I sat next to him at a table where we were served tea and assorted biscuits.
I said an awkward “Salaam” and began thanking him for making the time to meet me. There was a profound, quiet gentleness about him. I told him that someone near and dear to me had been in prison for fifteen years and that we were trying to exonerate him, that it was taking a toll on me, and that I was losing hope. I also told him about the dream I just had. He softly asked questions about the case, about Adnan. Then he asked to see a picture of him.
I pulled out the one photograph I had brought of Adnan, in which he was about twenty-three. The photo had been taken a few years into his incarceration, before he had been moved to the supermax prison in Cumberland. He stood with his arms around Yusuf, Saad standing by his side. He wore a white skullcap, had a short trimmed beard; his eyes were large and sad.
Shakyh Hisham took the picture in his hands while still gripping the prayer beads he held and stared at it. Then he looked up at me and said, “He is innocent, he will come home.”
After the dream and meeting the Shaykh I felt hopeful that we’d get a break in the case, re-energized to keep pushing, but nothing could have prepared me for what was coming around the corner in the next few months.
On October 1, 2014, Sarah sent me a message telling me the show would be something called a podcast and be not in six, or ten, but rather twelve parts. I had two thoughts: holy moly, twelve episodes?! And, what the heck was a podcast?
CHAPTER 10
SERIAL
The truth was a mirror in the hands of God.
It fell, and broke into pieces.
Everybody took a piece of it,
and they looked at it and thought they had the truth.
Jalaluddin Rumi, 13th-century Sufi mystic
“Does your mom know Saad outed himself as not a virgin on the podcast?”
It was the very first reaction I got from a friend who messaged me as soon as she heard Episode 1 of Serial, “The Alibi.” I hadn’t yet heard it, but by the time I got around to listening to it I had already gotten dozens of messages from friends and colleagues asking if I was the Rabia Chaudry on the podcast.
I heard from Saad and Yusuf, who also had spent their day fielding dozens of excited messages. After sharing a bit of mortification that Sarah had aired his comment about not being a virgin, Saad quickly shrugged it off. That was minor. What mattered was that this story was finally getting told. The energy from the feedback was positive, everyone sounded pumped, and I couldn’t wait to finally hear the show. Sometime in the evening of October 3, 2014, I finally sat down to listen to the first episode.
The music itself, overlaid with audio from the GlobalTel Link service through which Adnan and other inmates call family and friends, was surprising. It took what was mundane for us, years of waiting for the beep to press “0” to accept his collect call, and transformed it into something magical.
I felt hyper-aware the entire time, my shoulders tense, ears pricked. Hearing Adnan’s voice—from the opening sequence, to explaining his love and respect for Hae, to his helplessness at not being able to prove his every step after school on January 13, 1999—it gutted me in a way I wasn’t prepared for. I felt overwhelming sadness, grief, and hope. Finally, here it was, Adnan’s story. His voice, his words. But God, it had taken so long.
And then came Asia. After all, the first episode was “The Alibi.” Here was the one person we believed held Adnan’s freedom in her hands, saying publicly that she still remembered being with him after school at the time Jay said Adnan had killed Hae. I felt vindicated. Asia’s conversation with Sarah made it clear, despite what prosecutor Kevin Urick had testified to, that she was not pressured into making her written statements. After all these years, her memories of that afternoon were exactly the same, and while Sarah had told us long ago about their conversation, it was entirely a different experience to hear it from Asia herself.
The second episode, released simultaneously, documented Adnan and Hae’s doomed Romeo-and-Juliet romance. Sarah read from Hae’s diary and interviewed a number of their mutual friends, seeking clues for whether Adnan was possessive, controlling, any of the things the State alleged. She went over the homecoming dance fiasco. She spoke to Anjali, whom Adnan was dating at the time Hae disappeared. After investigating their relationship, Sarah said she didn’t buy the State’s version of motive. But she didn’t stop with investigating how Adnan acted during and after the relationship; she also went there—to the idea that his religion had something to do with how he felt about and treated Hae.
In “The Breakup,” Sarah says:
Remember the setup for this crime that the State laid out was that Adnan was betraying everything he held dear for this girl. As a good Muslim he was not supposed to be dating and so he was sacrificing his religion and lying to his family all just so he could be with her and it twisted him up inside. And Hae’s diary seems to be where they found some evidence for that. In fact, they had a friend of Hae’s, Debbie Warren, read excerpts from it on the witness stand. “I like him, no I love him.” She read at trial, dated May 15. “It’s just all the things that stand in the middle. His religion and Muslim customs are the main things. It irks me to know that I’m against his religion. He called me a devil a few times. I know he was only joking, but it’s somewhat true.”
So, yeah, anytime someone is writing stuff down like “sin” and “devil” and “religion means life” in reference to their secret relationship, that’s not good. But ask the Muslim in question about it, and it all seems so much smaller.
She had asked Adnan and also Saad and me. We all said the same thing: that it was ridiculous to conclude that Adnan was so serious about his religion that it was his life, but at the same time he was partying, drinking, smoking pot, dating, and having premarital sex.
I appreciated that Sarah made it clear there was no evidence that Adnan was a domineering, dangerous ex-boyfriend, but I was decidedly bothered that she felt uneasy about the religious comments in Hae’s diary. Why did Sarah think it looked bad for Adnan if he had to choose between Hae and his religion? There was no threat in this proposition other than the prospect of a broken heart. Did Sarah think that Adnan was perhaps religious enough to—in accordance with her own internal biases of what a possessive, religious Muslim man was like—kill a woman?
I couldn’t shake this thought, but the first few days after Serial launched I could barely come up for air to think it all through.
The public reaction to the podcast snowballed; within days the dozens of messages turned into hundreds. This American Life had dropped two beautifully produced, narratively seductive, completely intriguing episodes, and the world of podcasting was on fire. People immediately became obsessed with the case.
The media coverage was fast and furious; social media buzzed with millions of Tweets and shared Facebook statuses: Serial was an instant hit, and people could not wait for the following Thursday, when the next episodes would air.
Adnan didn’t yet know any of this. His family, Saad, and I began getting e-mails and calls from media outlets around the world for comment, but we held off. I decided to deal the best way I knew how—by blogging.
* * *
I did not write that very first blog post thinking, “I am totally going to undermine Sarah’s story and control the narrative.” My dinky little blog, hosted on Patheos, an interfaith writers’ site where I mostly railed against Muslim community issues that irritated me, was hardly a platform to rival This American Life. But I had things to say, even as early as the first week. The plan was to fill in the blanks, to broaden the context, and address some of the things that could make people say “hmmmm” (like the homecoming incident) with specificity. I wanted, basically, to explain things from our perspective—the perspective of the community, Adnan’s family, Adnan, myself.
Sarah was taking the listeners on a decidedly ambiguous journey. She presented a fact, a scene, an anecdote, showing us how it could work for Adnan or against him. Sarah had landed on why the story was fascinating—much of it, as she said herself, was spin.
And spin, whichever way you want it to go, does not rise to the level of evidence used to convict someone. There is no “beyond a reasonable doubt” when it comes to spin. There is only doubt. But doubt in the jury’s conviction was not good enough; we needed an overwhelming number of people to believe in Adnan’s actual innocence. And so I took to my blog, SplitTheMoon, and began writing. Every week, with every episode, I wrote. I wanted to add enough to the podcast that listeners would understand why, for all these years, I believed in Adnan’s innocence.
After my first few blog posts, I got an uncomfortable call from Sarah. She was not happy.
Here she had put in a tremendous amount of work, along with her team, to craft a particular storyline, and instead of letting it unfold without interfering I was mucking things up by blogging. I understood, and the last thing I wanted to do was damage her work. We owed her a tremendous debt for taking on Adnan’s story and telling it to the world. I didn’t want to upset her, but at the same time I knew that the public’s attention to the case would pass as quickly as the podcast. Human nature is fickle. I knew the day Sarah wrapped up this story, people would be ready for season two of Serial. I spoke about it with Adnan and he agreed. I already had experience with writing and public speaking, I had a platform, I knew the case, and there was no one in the family who was up to the task. He not only gave me permission to take the lead on all media, he requested that we keep his family out of the media as much as possible. And he had read the first few transcripts, heard the concern in Yusuf’s voice that there was ambiguity about his innocence in the show. He knew Sarah had to tell the story not only in a way to keep the listeners compelled but also in a way that was authentic to her. But that didn’t necessarily mean that after it was over, anyone would care about the case.
So I made Sarah a promise: I would never trump her story, I would never address anything she had not yet revealed (such as the involvement of the Innocence Project), and I would limit my blogs to the content of her episodes. But I wouldn’t stop writing.
“You have your agenda and I have mine,” I told her. My agenda was to exonerate Adnan and bring him home, and in order to do that I had to tell our side of the story.
* * *
So while I assured her that she had little to worry about, because Serial was reaching millions of people while my blog only reached tens of thousands, I was working on fixing that. I took to social media and put to use what I had learned in the past couple of years of organizing the New America Foundation social media trainings.
Every Thursday Serial would drop a new episode, and I would listen to it as soon as the girls were off to school. I’d let it marinate all day, thinking about the points I wanted to address. At night I would start going through the case files, looking for the documents I needed for the blog. I would write much of the night and aim to post the blog first thing in the morning.
And then it was all about Twitter. I found people tweeting about Serial and would respond to them, posting my blog with a message like “you can read more about the case here.” I did this twenty, thirty, forty times a day in the first few weeks, sharing my post over and over like a slightly unhinged person. I can only imagine how irritating it must have been for the followers I already had—about twelve thousand or so who (I assume) followed me because of my writing and commentary on faith, gender, politics, and national security. And now, all of a sudden, I almost exclusively tweeted about Adnan, Serial, and my blogs. Despite potentially turning off my regular followers, I shared my blogs with an obnoxious frequency until one day the huge digital media outlet Slate ran a piece called “If You Love Serial, You Should Be Reading This.” The “this” was my blog.
My readership shot up into the hundreds of thousands, and after that I shared my blogs a few times when they went live, and it was enough to get the circulation I wanted. Having been part of a number of Twitter campaigns, I knew we couldn’t do without a hashtag, and so #FreeAdnan was born. I tacked it on to the end of almost all my tweets, even to pictures of my cat, Mr. Beans. More than once, #FreeAdnan ended up trending on Twitter globally.
Despite what it may have looked like, there was no organized online campaign for Adnan. It was just me constantly on my smart phone, day and night, in bed, while working, traveling, even on the toilet. I responded to every tweet; I favorited, retweeted, and replied tens of thousands of times in those months.
* * *
Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Washington Post, the BBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, People, Time, Good Morning America, MSNBC, the list went on and on and on. From the most prominent publications in the United States, to local news affiliates, to international print and broadcast media, Serial was everywhere. Adnan Syed, who I had once hoped would get some modest media coverage by the likes of Dateline, was sharing headlines with international news.
Serial didn’t just give a global platform to Adnan’s case, it elevated the podcast medium to astronomical heights. Suddenly the podcast was sexy. At least half a dozen podcasts about Serial sprung up, and I found myself listening to all of them (even some absolutely terrible ones where the hosts could barely keep the facts straight), not only to learn what others had to say about Serial but most
ly what they thought about Adnan and the case. We, and by “we” I mean “team Adnan”—his family, me and my family—were definitely more sensitive regular listeners to Sarah’s portrayal of the facts and Adnan himself. We often honed in on, obsessed even, whether a given episode made him seem guilty or innocent. But perhaps the most robust, committed, and deeply involved set of strangers anywhere online was found on Reddit, a rabbit hole we were initially only too happy to jump into.
When the Serial podcast “subreddit” popped up with dozens of threads, Saad, Yusuf, Tanveer, and I eagerly joined the fray. I knew about Reddit, had been a lurker long ago, but had not returned in many years. We assumed, with incredible naïveté, that we would be a welcome addition to conversations; we could answer questions, give context, and be part of a supportive community that would help us fight for Adnan’s exoneration. Not completely so. On Reddit was where I first encountered not only challenges to our support for Adnan but direct hostility from strangers who were completely comfortable making the worst assumptions about us all. I never knew until then what it was like to, point-blank, be called a liar. Not just me, but Saad and Adnan’s brothers, and others who supported Adnan. Among the many ridiculous and disgusting allegations were: we know Adnan is guilty but persist in trying to free him; we are milking Serial for fame; Rabia is in love with Adnan, or maybe Sarah is … actually we both are because of his “dairy-cow eyes”; we coerced Asia into her statements, alternatively Rabia paid Asia for her affidavit in 2000; we are racist for pointing out Jay’s lies; Adnan confessed to us or to members of the mosque; mosque members or Adnan’s mother or father killed Hae and Adnan took the fall for it; we are dishonoring or somehow smearing Hae by challenging the conviction.
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