Searching For Answers

Asra (Archie Panjabi)and Mariane (Angelina Jolie) in A Mighty Heart

British Asian actor Archie Panjabi stars as Asra Nomani, a friend and colleague of Pearl at the Journal, with whom the couple stayed in Pakistan and whose Karachi home was turned into a command center in the search for him.

The film comes uncomfortably close to real life events that everyone has followed anxiously in recent years. Movies, however, have a way of sorting out everything in two hours and a few bags of popcorn later you have all the answers. But you come out wondering – is it really “The End”? Has Danny Pearl’s murder really been solved? And what about people like Asra Nomani who must now go on with their lives?

Little India spoke with the real Asra Nomani, who lives in Morgantown, W.Va. She says, “I do hope people will realize that the story doesn’t end with the movie because we still don’t know who killed Danny, we still don’t know why they killed him. As a journalist, that’s what I’m still interested in and that’s what I’m still working on.”

Nomani, who was a Journal journalist for 15 years, is currently a visiting professor at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies, where she is co-teaching an investigative journalism course, the Pearl Project. The journalist in her is skeptical of commonly held assumptions, including those on Omar Sheikh, the man convicted of Pearl’s murder.

“Why did Omar Sheikh’s name not come up at all when Danny went missing in spite of his having kidnapped Americans in the past? When India released Sheikh in the Kandahar hijacking, where did he go?” Nomani asks. “He was wandering the streets of Pakistan in 2002 so he had to have been on somebody’s radar. Did he have a special handler in the Pakistani intelligence that was his contact? Because as journalists, it’s not good enough to just assume he had links to the ISI.”

And then of course there is the bigger picture, that of endangered journalists in a difficult new world: “Danny would not have wanted us to have been fixated on him, but he became the turning point in the experience of journalists in the 21st century – and now we’re all sitting ducks. In the old days in Vietnam, you had press written across your chest and you were protected, but now it’s like we have a target on our back.

“I want to explore the question by understanding Danny’s death and why he had become fair game to so many. It seems a real misunderstanding of journalists and our role in society. There’s a serious distrust of journalists in the Muslim world. What’s the basis of that mistrust and what can we do about it?”

On a personal level too, Nomani was really caught in the crossfire, being a Muslim woman who had befriended Pearl, a Jew. Since she was born in India, there were also stories in the Pakistani papers implying that she was an agent for RAW, the Indian intelligence agency.

“It was completely hell. I was so naïve I really didn’t understand the political animosity between Indians and Pakistanis,” she says. “I have a family which flows both ways and so I did not know that because I was born in India I would be the subject of mistrust and even conspiracy theories.”

As a journalist, she always reported on the news and did not expect to become news herself. But in the Pearl case she was drawn into the maelstrom. She says, “I knew the bias and prejudice in my own communities and that did offend me deeply, but I also knew my parents had raised me with a deeper value system, which had allowed me to even be close friends with Danny.”

But there was a price to pay for this friendship and it was a scary time for her family. She recalls: “My extended family couldn’t even call me for fear they would then become suspect. My boyfriend baled out the first day for fear he would be detained or disappear. And at that time I learnt that I was pregnant. It was the last thing I would have expected. It added another layer of trauma, because I had basically lost my boyfriend and I had to make a choice whether to break every tradition in our culture and my religion, and have my child.”

At this traumatic time, Nomani realized she had to choose: cave in to her fears or continue to try and find Pearl’s killers. She says, “I knew this was my farz or duty as Danny’s friend, to stand up for him.”

It was also a time that she took on another battle, her rights as a Muslim woman. Not only did she decide to have her child as an unwed mother – a virtual taboo in her community, but she also started questioning her position as a woman in the Islamic world. Why did women have to take a backseat even in a dialogue with the Almighty?

Her father had helped found the mosque in Morgantown, but the Wahhabian influences there did not permit women to use the front door; they had to enter from the back and sit in the secluded balcony. They were not allowed to participate, but rather had to send their questions through a child to the mosque elders.

While researching her book, Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam, she visited Saudi Arabia, which was an eye-opener for her. In spite of Saudi Arabia being the home of puranitical Wahhabism, she found women could enter the most sacred mosque in the Muslim world through the front door. She also participated in the ancient ritual at Mecca where she got to follow, as every pilgrim does in the footsteps of Hajjar, the wife of prophet Abraham, who ran to search for water for her son Isma’il.

“We as women are not allowed to run now, because the Saudi law forbids it because it’s too titillating to see a woman running, so all we can do is walk slowly or maybe a little faster than slow,” she says. “For thousands of years women have been running in Hajjar’s footsteps, and now women can’t run? There should be equal opportunity for faith and it’s easier not to take a position, but it was a time when I felt I had to.”

Nomani took the most difficult steps in her life and actually walked in through the front door of the mosque in her community and insisted on staying over objections. It’s been a lonely fight, but she finally prevailed.

As a Muslim feminist, she has now made it her mission to see that women get a role in Islam by reinterpreting the faith. She believes that Sharia laws are not divine wisdom, but just man’s interpretation of theology and laws.

“So I say we can touch it – it’s not untouchable – and we have to, because Sharia is used by people for atrocities, as a cover for intolerance,” she observes. “We know it’s the same in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and even Buddhism. I realized these interpretations were having an affect on our lives: I might not have had my son had I believed in these laws. If my parents had believed in these laws, I might not have had this beautiful child.”

She adds, “It was because of people who believed that it was acceptable in Islam to kill a Jew and an American that Danny was murdered. That’s when I realized we had to stand up and that’s partly why it’s taken me this much time to come to the point of the investigation. I feel like I have now stood up strong in my community and I feel I’ve challenged it and that these men don’t define Islam.”

Nomani, who grew up till the age of four in Hyderabad, believes that living in that city with people of many faiths and communities influenced her parents’ world view. While she had the same conflicts many second generation Indian Americans have with immigrant parents, such as not being able to go to the prom, she was given many opportunities.

Her Muslim parents were open to many things: they allowed her to run track, attend graduate school and become a journalist – all difficult choices for a woman in a conservative Muslim family. She says, “Ultimately my parents freed me from so much without my even knowing it. In that way my parents really didn’t put barriers – they were always kind.”

Being brought up as an Indian Muslim was always tied to the experience of living with different faiths and an openness to other viewpoints. Says Nomani, “I feel we’ve now slipped backward – growing up, there wasn’t any divide. Wahhabi ideology seems to imply that Indian Muslims are not authentic, but I believe when we practice this kind of tolerance and pluralism we are more authentic to Islam’s ideals.”

For Nomani, whether it’s Pearl’s murder or the issues in her own life as a Muslim woman, it all comes back finally to who gets to be the interpreter of religion. She says, “It’s essentially a war of ideas and I’m going to fight for my view of what Islam should look like.”