Love is neither disapproved by religion, nor prohibited by the law,
for every heart is in God’s hands.
Ibn Hazm, “The Ring of the Dove,” circa 1022
I saw it on television at my parents’ house.
I sat straight up, shocked.
“Ami! Come here!”
My mother rushed in from the kitchen and stopped in her tracks.
A black-and-white photograph of Adnan with a thin, barely sprouted mustache occupied the upper right hand corner of the screen, while a news reporter casually informed us that he had been arrested in the murder of Hae Min Lee.
My mother started making calls. Yes, others had seen the news; no, no one had heard from the family. I sat stunned, my two-year-old daughter climbing around my lap.
After a few minutes of trying to figure out what had just happened, my mother grabbed her coat and told me to get up.
“We’re going over there now.”
Adnan’s family lived just a few streets away and as we pulled up, we saw vans of camera crews parked around the house. We parked, avoided looking at the cameras, and walked up to the front door. The house was dark.
We knocked a few times, shivering in the cold and crying. After a few minutes we understood they weren’t going to open the door right then. They just couldn’t.
We turned to leave and were approached by reporters asking for comments on Adnan’s arrest. Both my mother and I, teary and frozen, expressed our disbelief that he had anything to do with it, shaking our heads.
We went home and Saad arrived, also in shock. We did the only thing we knew how to do. We washed up and began to pray.
It would be a few days before Saad learned what happened on February 28, 1999. The police had surrounded Adnan’s house and woken him at 5:30 a.m. Disoriented and confused, he was told to get up and put on some clothes. He was cuffed in his bedroom and led into the narrow hallway. His father was away at a religious retreat. His mother asked the cops repeatedly, “Why are you taking him?” as Tanveer tried to send Yusuf, who was crying and confused, into the bedroom so he wouldn’t see his big brother in such terrifying circumstances.
Adnan looked at his family and tried to reassure them.
“It’s ok, it must be a mistake. I’ll be back.”
He really believed that.
* * *
There were layers upon layers of pain for Adnan’s family to deal with. This was no petty crime, no quiet case—it was the first time anyone in the community had ever been arrested, and for murder no less.
The newscasters reported over and over that the Syed’s son had been arrested for killing his ex-girlfriend. Their son’s private life, a life forbidden to Muslims, was known in every household. They lived within walking distance from the mosque, but now even appearing there took tremendous courage, courage they had to muster because now more than ever they needed their community.
But the community, while rallying around them, couldn’t stop buzzing with the scandal. This young man, someone they considered a “good boy,” had carried on an illicit relationship!
The Islamic Society of Baltimore (ISB) boasts of having the largest Muslim congregation in the state of Maryland. Over the past two decades, hundreds of Muslim families had settled around it, creating a close-knit, heavily South Asian community.
Hailing from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, the ISB community has managed, over time, to recreate the comforts and conveniences of back home while enjoying the security and opportunity of living in the United States. From authentic kabobs, curries, and tandoori breads sold at the mosque and many restaurants in the area, to halal grocery shops, to an Islamic school, to salons catering to South Asian women, the area is no less than a little “desi-stan.” (Desi is a common term for people from Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bangladesh.) In one short trip you can get your hands and arms henna tattooed, swing by the Islamic bookstore to grab some prayer rugs, dine on greasy parathas and chai, and hit the local cinema for the latest Bollywood movie.
Part of the preservation of their culture, as for many immigrant communities, was insisting on their cultural norms for their American-born-and-raised kids.
Basically the rules were: no dating, no alcohol, no partying, no drugs, and, for some, no opposite-gender friends.
We, meaning the kids, all knew what was really going on. Even those of us who were complete squares, like yours truly, were on the downlow grapevine. Who was dating who, who was cheating on who, who was seen drinking in the club, who got to school fully covered and yanked off jeans to reveal a miniskirt. Let’s just say 90210 had nothing on 21228. But part of the game, the most important part, was making sure your parents never found out. The stricter the parents, the more elaborate the schemes to keep them in the dark.
This was a function of both trying to be respectful to the folks, and, just as important, not wanting to get your butt kicked. Looking back, there was only so much a parent could do to a teenager who was breaking all the rules, but at the time the feared Pakistani parental discipline options ranged from the infamous chappal, a rubber slipper and household staple that sometimes found its way to the backside of a child, to being shipped off to the motherland and betrothed to an unknown cousin eagerly awaiting his or her American visa.
These things weren’t common, but they also weren’t unheard of. It really depended on the gravity of the offense itself.
Living in the dorms at a prestigious college, a friend of mine fell in love her freshman year; he was her first boyfriend and first physical relationship. One weekend, while she was out with friends, her parents decided to pay her a surprise visit. The RA let them into her dorm to wait for her, where her mother, as Pakistani mothers are programmed to do, began poking around. By the time my friend returned to campus, her parents had found solid evidence of her hanky-panky. Her belongings were promptly packed and she was immediately yanked out of school and driven, sobbing and in shock, back to her hometown many hours away. A couple of years later, when she attempted to move out of the house so she could attend another university, her mother (a wonderful, loving woman) draped herself across the hood of my friend’s car to block her from driving away. My friend slowly reversed out, making her mom gently slip off the front of the car, and drove away.
To people not raised by parents or in communities with strong cultural and religious traditions that make a lot of things off-limits (the “haram,” a.k.a. prohibited, factor as known by Muslims), this can all sound crazy. Controlling and abusive even. But our parents were doing the best they could to save us from things they thought would hurt us. For our parents, preventing us from sinning was not about control, it was about love.
Because the trouble wasn’t the sin itself, it was what that could lead to. And of all sins, the one they most worried about was getting involved in a relationship before marriage. It was love. And it was sex.
* * *
There are more than fifty words describing various kinds of love in the Arabic language, according to the famous 14th-century Muslim scholar, theologian, and jurist Ibn Qayyim al Jawziyya. From “syaghaf,” love that resides painfully but silently deep in the recesses of the heart, to “ishq,” an extreme and even obsessive manifestation of love with lustful connotations, to “hub,” a pure, clean, unadulterated love, the sound of which appropriately rises like a sigh from the chest and ends with lips pressed tenderly together and released—the Arabs had no aversion to this affliction of the heart. But it was definitely considered an affliction.
“Love—may God exalt you!—” the frequently lovesick Ibn Hazm writes, “is in truth a baffling ailment, and its remedy is in strict accord with the degree to which it is treated; it is a delightful malady, a most desirable sickness. Whoever is free of it likes not to be immune, and whoever is struck down by it yearns not to recover.”
Boy, was Ibn Hazm right.
My adolescence stands as testimony to the desirability of this ailment as I serial-crushed my way through high school, where I was the newspaper editor and photographer-at-large.
I’d run around school during and after hours, at sporting events, plays, meetings, with my trusty Nikon around my neck. I was intrepid, empowered; I got to go anywhere with my self-made press pass.
Even more importantly, I had an excuse to take pictures of every boy I crushed on, an honor I bestowed on almost every boy I went to school with for at least a few days each, sometimes simultaneously.
Once in a while I was joined in the crimson development cave by a student banished to it, forced to learn how to develop pictures to get at least partial credit from Ms. Buzzard, the photography teacher. One day it was the co-captain of the football team, Dave.
My short, plump body was literally on fire as he hovered behind me, looking over my shoulder into the pans of developer and stop fluid.
Once the prints were rinsed off and ready to be hung, Dave realized he had a chance to ask me a burning question.
“So, Rabia, what’s the deal? You’re pretty cute. How come you don’t have a boyfriend?”
After the shock of being told for the first time in my life by a male specimen that I was not bad to look at, I got my wits together and stammered a response.
“Well. I’m Muslim. And Muslims, well … Muslims don’t date.”
* * *
The more accurate thing to say would have been, “Muslims aren’t supposed to date.” And to be clear, THIS Muslim didn’t. At least not until college, when I met my future ex-husband.
You cannot lump together the cultural expectations and restrictions of all Muslim Americans or immigrant parents or communities; after all, we are one of the most diverse religious groups in the United States. Still, there are common threads, and they don’t just apply to Muslims. By and large, “eastern” cultures, including “far eastern” cultures, have traditionally been highly conservative on the issues of dating, sex, and marriage.
Many such cultures traditionally skip right over the dating part and get right to marriage, with sex meant to be strictly within nuptial confines. Arranged marriages have not only been the lot of Middle Easterners and “desis,” they are part of Asian culture writ large. From China to Japan, Korea, Thailand, and other parts of this region, sex segregation and arranged marriages were the custom until just a few decades ago.
For the children of immigrants in the United States and other Western nations, old ways often stick around longer than they do back in the “homeland.” Parents and grandparents bring and cling to the cultural rules they were raised with, unaware that back home people have moved on, modernized, and, shockingly, changed.
A prime example of this was the time my father told me in high school that when his sisters and nieces were my age, they all wore their hair well-oiled and in two braids and I should too. He was remembering Lahore in the 1960s. We were in the 1990s, when my female relatives in Pakistan were sporting short Princess Diana cuts.
Boys, sex, and marriage were unmentionables in our house. We didn’t even use the word “pregnant” because we all knew how women got that way. Well, sort of.
If Bollywood movies, our only source of romance and escapism, were to be believed, people fell head-first in love through silent but frequently exchanged glances, barely touching but breathless and bothered. If ever the “hero” reached out to try and touch his beloved, she would fake protest, blush, and turn away even as her bosom heaved. Eventually the would-be lovers would beat the odds (meaning their parents), get married, hug for the first time, and the next frame would show them happily prancing around a baby.
For most of my childhood I thought hugging was how you made babies.
This eventually was corrected when my mother reluctantly gave signed permission for me to attend a sex-ed class in fifth grade, on the condition of NEVER, EVER discussing what I learned there with anyone. Especially not my younger sister and brother. If ever there was a shock to my system, fifth-grade sex ed was it. I refused to believe for at least another three years that my parents would do any of that, and I refused to believe I’d ever do any of that for at least the next six years.
The day before my parents dropped me off at college, my mother had a little talk with me. I was going to live in a dorm against her wishes, having managed to snag enough grants and student loans to pay for it myself.
I was the first kid to go away, I knew this was not going to be easy on my parents, and a part of me didn’t believe it was actually going to happen.
That’s why, when I sat next to my mother, a pit grew harder and larger in my stomach as I waited for her to say something. Not believing in overt affection or anything less than a strict parent-child dynamic, my mom had never had a heart-to-heart with me before.
In her gentlest voice she said, “Look, you’re going to college and will be in a mixed, co-ed setting and there may be boys who are interested in you. And that’s ok. It’s ok if a boy is interested in you. And it’s ok if you’re interested in him. After all, you have to get married at some point. So don’t be scared to tell us. Come tell me if there’s anyone. It’s ok if you tell me. Also, better if it’s a white boy. White boys will easily convert, and they don’t have all the baggage of large, desi in-law families.”
It was never made clear how I could entice a non-Muslim white boy to convert and marry me without actually dating one, or letting one touch me, but heck, at least I now had permission.
Except it wasn’t really permission. It was a trap.
A year and change later, after I had met and fallen in love with a Pakistani international student who wanted to get married, I went running happily to my mother to break the news. It did not go well.
Just because she told me it was ok to “meet” someone, code for dating-without-touching-but-with-the-goal-of-marriage, didn’t mean it was. The verbal and emotional smack-down blindsided me. How dare I be involved with a man? How dare I vocalize my desire to get married?! Where was my shame? Since when did girls talk to parents of their own marriage?! Not in 1995 they didn’t, not in the Chaudry house.
But I was definitely much more old-school than the kids in our communities. By kids I mean people more than five years my junior who operated with more abandon, and started much sooner, when it came to dating.
My younger siblings were no exception. I knew this intuitively, but also because I saw little signs here and there, heard whispers and allusions to their romantic activities. But I never knew for sure.
This was another cultural rule—when you know someone is doing something they shouldn’t, you look the other way.
* * *
Hiding your sins and the sins of others is not just a cultural norm, it’s a religious mandate in Islam.
Whoever fulfills the needs of his brother, Allah will fulfill his needs; whoever removes the troubles of his brother, Allah will remove one of his troubles on the Day of Judgment; and whoever covers up the fault of a Muslim, Allah will cover up his fault on the Day of Judgment.
—Prophet Muhammad (Sahih Bukhari)
Covering the faults of another essentially boils down to not gossiping and spreading someone’s business. It also means not prying, not spying, leaving people to their personal business. A sin is supposed to be strictly between the sinner and God.
There is a story about a man who came to the Prophet Muhammad (and these stories, collectively known as hadith, form a large part of the foundation of Islamic belief and practices) and confessed he was sleeping with a woman he wasn’t married to. He felt guilty and thought he should be punished. An important early Muslim, Umar ibn Khattab, who would later become one of the Caliphs of Islam after the Prophet died, heard his confession. He said to the confessor, “Allah kept your secret, so why did not you keep your secret?”
To be clear, this applies to personal sins only. It doesn’t apply to any instances in which the life, liberty, or property of another has been infringed on or damaged. Those are not just sins, they’re crimes, and they have to be reported, accounted for, and the wronged person made whole.
But teenagers drinking, smoking pot, dating, sleeping around—all the things that happened in the Baltimore Muslim community (and I dare say most communities, religious and irreligious) despite parental strictness—were off the table. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” were, and are, the rules in South Asian communities when it comes to personal indiscretions.
The Islamic Society of Baltimore, and all the families connected with it, was no exception. Which is why part of the trauma for the community was that Adnan’s personal life was cracked wide open and made public.
* * *
“How did you find out Adnan had a girlfriend?”
I had never asked Aunty Shamim this before—asking potentially embarrassing questions, prying, we didn’t do this. But now, sixteen years after Adnan was arrested, it seems like enough time has passed to broach the subject.
Aunty smiles to herself and shifts, blinks rapidly, her eyes down. Even after all this time, she’s not fully comfortable. But she’s also not apologetic.
Dating was not permissible, not then, and not now. Not for any of her children. The first time she suspected something was when Adnan was dropped off at home by a young woman—she couldn’t see her face, but could see that it was a girl, a girl who quickly drove away. She asked Adnan about her.
“Just a friend,” was Adnan’s response, but his mother knew something was up. Soon after she caught him up, late at night, on the phone. She heard him speaking in a low voice and knew it couldn’t be with another guy, not at that hour, not in that tone. So she carefully picked up a receiver in another room and caught him red-handed.
After that came the arguments between mother and son. Adnan’s father stayed out of it; he was completely unconcerned. All he knew was that Adnan was a good student, went with him to the mosque, was polite, and would soon be off to college.
Aunty is young for a grandmother. She is slight, with clear, fair skin, bright eyes, and frizzy hair that can never seem to stay within the confines of a scarf or a hair tie.
She was only sixteen when the family of Syed Rahman came around, seeking a suitable bride for him. He was forty-one, had a good life in the United States, and his father had a friend who had a niece they heard was lovely. Her name was Shamim but she didn’t come from Turu, the same small village as Syed’s family. Shamim lived with her parents and six sisters in Mardan, the “city of hospitality” in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province. She was a student, and a bit too young to be married off just yet. But two years later her parents consented.
Aunty Shamim was eighteen when she married her forty-three-year-old husband, a man she didn’t know who lived in the United States. Two weeks after the wedding in Pakistan, she found herself in Baltimore.
She was less nervous than her family about marrying a man more than twice her age and then moving halfway across the world. Her fortitude in that stressful situation is no surprise to me. Since Adnan’s arrest she has been a pillar of strength, putting on an outward appearance of resolve, sometimes even cheer, when in public.
But while she was able to embrace the entrepreneurial spirit of America, opening and running her own home daycare center as she raised three boys, her cultural expectations and traditions remained relatively firm. At least when it came to dating.
Pakistan, some may be surprised to know, is much more diverse in its range of conservatism to liberalism than are most countries in the Western hemisphere. Some of this diversity is a function of local tradition, some a function of local development, and some a function of family custom.
In large cities like Lahore, Islamabad, and Karachi, you’ll find young women filling universities and workplaces, hair fashionably coiffed, showing off trendy clothing. And I don’t mean just now. My mother recalls being at the university in Lahore in the 1960s when some of her classmates decided to join the sexual revolution and dispense with wearing bras. At the same time my mother had decided, on her own, to start wearing a burka to cover up everything, including her face. She didn’t come from a family where that was the norm. Her own mother was a college graduate at a time when not many women made it that far in education, and my “Nani” (maternal grandmother) and her sisters thought nothing of wearing sleeveless sari blouses, hair piled into beehives or bouffants. My burka’d mother, however, ran a girls’ college while Nani never worked outside of the home.
It wasn’t odd then, or now, to find families in the city where some women worked, others didn’t get past grade school, some preferred burkas, and others skin-tight sleeveless kurtas (longish shirts). Out in the villages, you may find less diversity in what is socially acceptable; it usually depends on regional ethnicity and local tradition.
My parents’ families are from the Punjab region, where women are stereotyped as forward and confident. I’ve heard this is linked to the strong agricultural tradition of the area, in which women historically worked the fields instead of staying confined to the house, or to Punjabi culture itself, which is infamous for being boisterous and unfiltered.
Adnan’s family comes from a region of Pakistan that many Punjabis find as foreign as China.
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (“KPK”), previously known as the NWFP or North-West Frontier Province, is one of four provincial regions in Pakistan. KPK is the northernmost province in the country, bordered by Afghanistan to the west and north, and by Azad Kashmir to the east. Geographically, it is one of the most stunning regions in Pakistan.
Snowcapped peaks and deep green valleys invite a lot of Pakistani tourists, honeymooners, global adventure seekers, and mountain climbers. Ancient Buddhist and Hindu ruins dot the landscape.
The Pashtuns are known to be immensely hospitable, loyal, and have a deep sense of traditional values in which the honor of family and guests is paramount. Pashtuns are also the butt of many jokes, chided for being simple-minded, with little common sense and zero street smarts. But while other Pakistanis may find their “simplicity” amusing, the Pashtun’s immovable sense of family and tribal affiliation, which are both key to the Pashtun identity and sacred institutions, is duly admired. It could not have been easy for Aunty Shamim and Uncle Syed to have left their families and migrate halfway across the world, but the promise of a better life for their future family compelled them.
Adnan’s parents put down roots in the Catonsville area. They had no other family in the entire country, much less in Maryland, but they had the mosque. And this would be the mosque Adnan and his brothers would be raised in; this would be the community that was their family.
Before we actually sold our house in Hagerstown and moved, my father had to start his new job in Baltimore. He rented a room down the street from the mosque in the summer of 1995. Saad was fourteen at the time and every so often he would go hang out with him.
One day during a visit, Saad was shooting hoops in the parking lot of the ISB when a gangly, smiling boy came over and introduced himself.
“Hi, I’m Adnan. Are you new around here?”
Saad was wearing a basketball camp T-shirt, which caught thirteen-year-old Adnan’s interest, and they began shooting hoops. Saad explained that he lived in Hagerstown but would soon be moving to Baltimore.
Not long after, when the family shifted to Ellicott City about ten miles from the ISB, Saad gave Adnan a call as promised.
“We got together at the Security Mall and Adnan asked me, ‘Ok, how much money do you have?’ I told him I had $15. Adnan said, ‘I have $30 so that means we have $45 together.’” Saad knew right then that this guy had a big heart.
They were both starting ninth grade that year, though Saad was a year older. A prolonged trip to Pakistan when he was in elementary school had put him back a year. But they attended different schools, and they did most of their hanging out on the weekends at the mosque. They quickly became best friends; Yusuf once remarked that Saad was more of a brother to Adnan than he or Tanveer ever were. Saad’s presence in Adnan’s life made a few of Adnan’s other friends feel left out, though—Yaser Ali and Tayyab Hussein in particular. Yaser, a family friend since childhood, had considered himself Adnan’s best friend; years later he would testify that he was edged out when Saad showed up.
Adnan and Saad weren’t jocks, but sports were their primary concern. Girls had their place in conversation, but the first couple of years of their friendship neither of them dated.
“We were late-bloomers in the girls’ department,” Saad recalls.
It wasn’t until their junior year, when they both had driver’s licenses and access to cars, that the world of dating opened up. Because Saad was a year older he got his third-hand manual BMW before Adnan had a car. It wasn’t unusual for Saad to park at the church across the road from Adnan’s house at night, waiting for him to sneak out after his parents went to sleep so they could hit up a party.
Sleeping parents have always provided the perfect opportunity for kids to get away with their indiscretions. One of the more extreme stories I’ve heard is about a family of Pakistani-American brothers I know, not even Muslims mind you, who more than once served their loving parents after-dinner tea with a mild sleeping aid mixed in. The parents got the soundest sleep of their lives, waking up refreshed and clueless, while the brothers painted the town red. It was a win-win as far as those guys were concerned.
Saad and Adnan, along with other friends from the mosque, would usually stake out Indian or Pakistani parties to check out the girls. “Garba” dance parties, an incredibly festive and colorful Gujarati Hindu tradition during the season of Navratri (literally “Nine Nights”), attracted a lot of Muslim desi boys, thanks partly to the girls’ traditional outfits—gorgeously decorated skirts that flared with every turn and beautiful midriff-baring, fitted blouses. During these nine nights, different avatars of the Hindu goddess Durga are worshipped by dancing in flying, concentric, increasingly fast circles around her figure, along with other rituals. This is technically about as “haram” as you can get for strictly monotheistic Muslims, just-say-no-to-idol-worship-101, but as a cultural phenomenon it is no less acceptable than carving up a tandoori-flavored Thanksgiving turkey. This is the cultural hodgepodge that kids, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent, where Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Christians, and Buddhists have been living together for centuries, are accustomed to. Being raised in the West adds one more dimension to an already complicated but very much culturally egalitarian identity.
Thanks to these parties and events where he met girls from around the state, Saad secretly ended up going to numerous school homecomings, but never to Woodlawn High, and Adnan never went to Saad’s school either. Most of their mutual friends came from the mosque, and many of Adnan’s friends annoyed the hell out of Saad.
“His problem was he was friends with EVERYBODY. I mean with guys I thought were losers, idiots, dead weights. Even guys I thought were just bad influences, like Tayyab. They’d do dumb stuff like egg houses together. Adnan was better than that, and I told him that. There were times we’d hang out all day with some of his other friends and I wouldn’t even talk to any of them. I’d ask him why the heck was he giving these guys the time of day?! I guess I was kind of the snob or jerk about it. But Adnan gave everyone attention, he just couldn’t say no to people. He was too nice, that was his problem.”
It was partly Adnan’s failure to be more selective about people that landed him where he is today. If he had followed Saad’s advice, Jay Wilds, the young man who would have such an impact on Adnan’s fate, could never have gotten close enough to hurt him. But then, it was his own bad habits that opened the door to Jay.
Adnan had taken up occasional pot smoking, and Jay supplied him with the weed. He had an occasional drink too. Saad hadn’t crossed that threshold yet in high school. Those things were easy to stay away from.
Girls? Not so easy.
* * *
“She was Adnan’s girlfriend? Adnan?? Had a girlfriend? Hae was his GIRLFRIEND??!” I yelled in disbelief.
Saad scowled. Adnan’s dating life was irrelevant.
It wasn’t that the murder charge didn’t strike me as monumental, it did—it shook me to my core. But it also seemed ludicrous. The cops had clearly made a mistake, and that mistake would soon be remedied.
But Adnan’s reputation, now that rumors had been spreading at ISB about his recreational activities? I wasn’t so sure it could be rehabilitated.
In some way, almost every child raised right in front of the community’s eyes, every kid who is seen consistently at the mosque, every young boy or girl who maintains ties to their roots and religion, is a golden child. It wasn’t just Adnan. It was all of us, all the boys and girls who got good grades, showed up dutifully for Sunday school, dressed and behaved properly in front of the grownups—we were all golden. Hiding what we did privately wasn’t considered hypocrisy. It was considered respectful.
And though much is made of being raised in the United States, in a country and culture where the norm is often anathema to Pakistani or Muslim traditions, the truth is that every generation rebels against their elders, even those raised “back home.”
One of the many lessons on decorum and parental-child relationships my father has repeated throughout our lives is this: “I never spoke back to my father. I never objected to what he said to me. I always agreed no matter what. If he forbade me from doing something, I said ‘ok.’ But then I did what I wanted to. I just respected him enough not to flaunt it, and to hide it. That’s how you respect your elders.”
This is the complicated dance of fear, respect, and love that many of us grew up with, a dance that could only be avoided by simply not disobeying your folks.
Adnan and Saad both danced and mostly got away with it—until Adnan was arrested. Then Adnan’s indiscretions became a lesson between parents and kids.
“See? This is what happens when you disobey us. This is what happens when you date. This is what happens when you stop acting like a Muslim.”
The aunties disguised their breathless gossip as concern and sadness.
“Subhan Allah, so terrible, so terrible for the family that he was doing all these things, and now the entire world knows. I can’t imagine what Shamim must be going through. Should we check on her? Should we ask her if all of this is really true?”
And this was just about the dating. The pot, the alcohol, the sex, all that would come out later during the trial. It was a small mercy that these other things remained under wraps until then, giving the community enough headspace to rally together and organize for Adnan’s defense.
Bilal Ahmed took the lead in organizing community support. A self-styled youth leader, Bilal was of Pakistani descent, had been raised in Saudi Arabia, and had moved to Maryland to study at the University of Maryland, Baltimore Campus, or UMBC. He was a half dozen years or so older than the kids he “mentored” at the local mosque, and as for most of the kids in the community, well, he annoyed the fuck out of us.
Bilal did himself no favors by refusing to look the other way. He strutted around campus with I’M TOO SEXY buttons on his backpack, keeping an eye on kids in the community and making sure their secrets were not kept.
One of the best-known stories of that era, a veritable legend, was a stunt Bilal pulled at an Indian and Pakistani student dance party on campus. “Ajooba” was going to be the hottest desi event that year. A party like that didn’t just attract local South Asian college kids, local South Asian high school kids also planned to go—including a number of my little sister’s friends.
“Everybody found out what happened, and everybody still remembers it,” Rana says, giggling. Rana was one of the “Baltimore girls,” a group of my sister’s friends who grew up around the mosque and attended UMBC together. She was still in high school when it all went down, and so were a number of her friends who attended the party that day.
Bilal, having heard not just about the party but about the plans of some of the ISB kids to be there, showed up at the dance and planted himself outside the entrance door, a memo pad in hand. He took down the names of all the kids whose parents attended the ISB, even though many of them tried to dodge him once they realized what he was up to. One girl, the daughter of one of ISB’s “pillar” families, was already inside. There was no hiding and no escape. Seated at a table, this girl saw Bilal take his position. She did the only thing she could think of. She dove under the table.
But it was too late for her, and dozens of others. At the very next Friday prayer service Bilal announced the names of kids who had been at the dance in front of a mortified congregation. Suffice it to say, it was a rough weekend for a lot of the kids. Rana remembers her father coming home from prayers and grilling her about the party. Like most of the elders, he was more irritated and angry at Bilal than he was at the kids who were exposed. A public shaming like that broke the rules of decorum and left the parents fuming.
But Adnan, again to the chagrin of Saad and others, was friends with Bilal, and Bilal, oddly, didn’t “out” Adnan. In fact, he covered Adnan’s exploits, agreeing to tell his parents Adnan was with him when Adnan would instead be out clubbing or with a girl. When Adnan’s mother failed to get him to break up with Hae, she reached out to Bilal to help guide her son. Little did she know he was enabling Adnan. Years later, when Aunty Shamim learned that the young man she entrusted with guiding her son instead facilitated his hijinx, she was bitter and upset.
But she had other reasons to find fault with Bilal. As the person who took charge when Adnan was arrested, Bilal not only organized the community fund-raising for legal costs, he also found Adnan an attorney.
Aunty Shamim blamed Bilal for the most catastrophic decision the family would make when it came to her son’s defense—hiring Cristina Gutierrez.
Adnan:
I know that there are many instances in our community where you have tension-filled households due to parents attempting to enforce conservative cultural/religious values. These strict rules would clash with the liberal society their children were exposed to. I have heard of and seen the turbulent atmosphere in homes where the parents were in a constant struggle with a rebellious teen. Witnessing this as I was growing up caused me to appreciate the calm and loving home life that my parents provided for my brothers and me.
As a child, I spent most of my free time at our local mosque. Most of us kids did. We would ride our bikes there after school and stay late into the evening. During the summer we would spend the whole day there. Prayers and religious classes only took up a fraction of our time. We usually spent most of our days and nights playing.
A large addition was being built on the property, and for several years we had access to a construction site. We would run around on the beams, climb the scaffolding, and other things. One summer, we stole a bunch of scrap wood, some two-by-fours, a hammer and nails, and we built a bridge across the creek. It was about ten feet long, with a handrail and three-feet-tall support poles we had sunk into the creek bed. My childhood was full of happy days playing with my friends at the mosque.
Once we all began entering our teenage years, around the end of middle school and the beginning of high school, things began to change. Many of us started dating and going to parties. We also began experimenting with marijuana and alcohol. These were things typical of almost any kid at that age. For us, however, it was different because of the conservative nature of our families. We were doing things that our parents did not approve of, and now a different and new dynamic came into play.
For some of our friends, life became very stressful. Those with parents who were very strict ended up in extremely difficult situations as they tried to do the things that normal kids did. Their households would become very chaotic as the parents struggled to enforce a strict code of behavior. The friend would rebel, and it would create a very turbulent home life. The sad irony is that it would usually cause the teen to engage in the most reckless behavior of all of us, like drug and alcohol abuse and failing classes. It seemed as if the parents’ attempts to clamp down seemed only to instigate more harmful behavior. Perhaps it was the notion of “I know I’m gonna get in big trouble, so I may as well make it worthwhile.” Whatever the case, I have had friends who grew up in these very strict households, only to end up in a bad way. Witnessing these sad outcomes always caused me to be thankful that I was never in that situation with my family.
I was very fortunate to have very supportive and loving parents. They were never the type to be strict with us in general. They raised my brothers and me with the religious and cultural values they believed in. More importantly, they taught us that we were free to make our own choices, but that we always had to be prepared to take responsibility for our actions.
They did both have individual aspects of life they were strict about. For my father it was school. He was someone whose education had earned for him an opportunity to raise himself out of poverty. Owing to that, he never failed to instill in us the importance of doing well in school. Our maintaining high grades was the number-one priority, for him.
For my mother it was the subject of social interaction. She was more in tune with the problems facing young people. Substance abuse was one of her major concerns, as she had seen several other teens fall victim to it. To her, staying out late and going to parties was the gateway to all of that.
From a religious standpoint, my mother was also against dating. Our religion has very strict rules about that, essentially that it was not allowed. It was never something that caused her to give us ultimatums, or threaten to kick us out of the house. It was just that she expressed her disapproval and let it be known that she did not want us to have girlfriends.
It didn’t stop me; however, it did cause me to be very mindful of my behavior. Or rather, work extra hard not to get caught. It wasn’t so much that I was worried about getting in trouble; mainly, it was that I wanted to be respectful to my parents, in a way. I was going to do the things that I wanted, but it was also important to me that I never make them unhappy. I never wanted to disappoint them.
So as high school began, I did my best to hide the things that I did. I secretly bought a pager, so no girl would have to call the house to get in touch with me. I would wait for my parents to go bed before I went out at night on the weekends. I always made sure my clothes would never smell of perfume, or marijuana, when I returned home.
At the same time, I worked very hard to achieve the things that would make my parents proud of me. I got good grades in school, I did volunteer work, and I always had some type of job. I did whatever I could to help around the house. I’ve always had a great deal of love and respect for my parents. Not just because of how hard they worked to provide a good life for us, but also because of the contrast between their parenting styles and that of others. Seeing the stressful situations of my other friends’ home lives caused me to have a greater appreciation for my own.
I’ll be honest, I hate hearing/reading that portion of my adolescence being described as a “double life.” To me, that phrase implies a negative connotation associated with hypocrisy. It brings to mind someone who calls people to do one thing, but does the opposite in secret. And that is something I never did. I only wanted to live my life the way other kids did, but I also realized that in order to protect my parents from hurt and disappointment, I had to hide things from them. I didn’t hide anything to protect some “righteous” persona I had cultivated …
From a religious perspective, my friends and I didn’t really feel like it was a big deal. It seemed that we all kind of had the same idea; we would have a good time, do good in school, grow up, get married, and then become more serious about our faith. There really was not a whole lot of self-doubt, or soul-searching. In a way, we felt that being Muslim was more about loving our people than about adhering to the conservative tenets of our faith. Which, to an adult, may seem far-fetched. But to a teenager it made perfect sense. We were all pretty much doing the same thing, and none of us viewed ourselves as being bad Muslims.
By the time Hae and I began dating I had a relatively scandal-free career. Having never been in a relationship, I never had a reason to go on capers every single day. I could hang out on the weekends with girls and go to parties, but during the week it was pretty much just school or work. Being in a relationship, however, had me talking on the phone with Hae each night, wanting to spend every evening with her after school, going on dates, and so on. I was having to evade suspicion every day. Pretty soon it was impossible not to get caught.
The first time my mother caught me talking to Hae on the phone was the morning after our Junior Prom. We were talking about how much fun we had the night before and all of a sudden I heard my mother’s voice cut in, “Hey, I just want you to know that Adnan has many other girlfriends, and you’re not the only one.” I was stunned and speechless to hear her voice interrupt our conversation with no warning.
Hae and I were both well experienced in the need to have secret conversations on the phone, as she had a similar home life. We both knew that if you heard a “click” someone had picked up a phone. We would usually just hang up at that point, as we would have no way of knowing whose home it was in. We would then page each other when the coast was clear. But in this case, there was no “click.” My mother’s voice had just broken into our conversation. I would find out later that she had unplugged the phone jack from the wall outlet. Next she removed the handset from the cradle, and then plugged the jack back in. That way there was no “click” from the handset disconnecting from the cradle.
As far as what she actually said, well, I couldn’t help but laugh at her creativity. Even now, all these years later, I still laugh about it. My mother told me she had thought of it on the fly, and she just wanted to say something that would make the girl not want to talk to me anymore. It was actually very funny.
Later that day my mother had a long talk with me about it. I denied everything, of course, and told her Hae and I were just friends. I don’t think my mother believed me, but she left it alone. Throughout the rest of our relationship Hae and I both experienced those same types of situations. Her mom had issues with us dating as well. There were never any huge blowups, however, or ultimatums or threats. Both our mothers eventually became upset, and I think that’s what weighed on us the most.
Once it became clear that we were continuing to see each other, it caused friction between us and our mothers. And it was not something we could hide from them. Eventually, Hae decided that it wasn’t really worth the stress it seemed to be causing them, and us. So that was when she first decided to call off our relationship. And each subsequent breakup was for essentially the same reason.
To be honest, I really don’t have any regrets from those days. Dating Hae was an amazing experience, and I wouldn’t change it for anything. She became someone I cared for deeply, and I cherish the times we spent together, both as girlfriend/boyfriend and as friends. I treasure the memories I have of her.
I’m grateful for all the friends I had, and I can’t help but smile as I think of all the crazy and silly things we did. As a Muslim, I know I did things that were not compatible with Islamic rules. But I feel that all of those experiences combined to give me a broader perspective on life, and I believe that perspective allows me to have a deeper appreciation for my faith. I’m fairly certain that most of us who had similar adolescent experiences probably would say the same thing.