November/December 2008

jewish Enterprise
Standing Up For Truth

Asra Nomani and Daniel Pearl first met as young Wall Street Journal reporters in Washington during the summer of 1993. Pearl was Jewish, the child of Israeli immigrants; Nomani, who emigrated from India with her parents at the age of four, had grown up in a traditional Muslim household in Morgantown, West Virginia. When Pearl learned that Nomani’s parents had forbidden her from attending that essential American coming-of-age experience—the senior prom—he threw her a “Mid-Summer’s Night Prom.”

“It was the whole shebang,” says Nomani, 43, a petite woman with dark shoulder-length hair. “I was wearing purple velvet gloves up to my elbows and Danny had on a tuxedo and then we had this really cheesy backdrop of a Caribbean island for us to take pictures in front of. I felt fully realized then as a child of America,” she jokes. Later, Pearl took Nomani to her first Yom Kippur service. “He was a great friend, the kind that is your lunch buddy and your cubicle gossip mate.”

Nine years later, Pearl and his wife Mariane, then well into the second trimester of her pregnancy, stayed with Nomani at her rented house in Karachi, Pakistan, for what was to be a brief reporting trip. On the afternoon of January 23, 2002, Pearl caught a taxi outside the house en route to interview Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gelani. He was investigating potential ties between Gelani and Richard Reid, the British shoe bomber. “He thought he’d be back for dinner,” recalls Nomani.

Pearl never returned. For five weeks, Nomani and Mariane Pearl lived in a state of perpetual disbelief and unyielding hope. “Every day we would awaken and expect that this would be the day that Danny would come back,” says Nomani. Their hopes were dashed when a video showing Pearl’s decapitation by radical Islamists began circulating online in late February. “I am a Jewish American,” Pearl said before his captors slit his throat. “My father’s Jewish, my mother’s Jewish, I’m Jewish.”

That summer, four men were convicted in Pakistan for Pearl’s kidnapping and murder, including Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh—allegedly tied to both al-Qaeda and the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency. Although Sheikh was sentenced to death, Nomani felt that many important questions remained unanswered. “The newspapers were filled with stories of other men who were involved but who never seemed to get charged,” she says.

That same summer, at a café in Paris’ quaint Montmartre neighborhood, Jill Abramson, now the managing editor of The New York Times, suggested that Nomani look into the case herself. She recommended as a model the Arizona Project, launched in 1976 by journalists from across the country to investigate mysterious circumstances surrounding the murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles. Nomani agreed, but for the next five years the Danny Project, as she then called it, existed only as an abstraction.

In early 2007, Nomani emailed a proposal to Barbara Feinman Todd, associate dean of journalism at Georgetown University. Within weeks, the two were at work creating a seminar to look into Pearl’s death. The Pearl Project began that fall; Nomani and Feinman Todd charged the students with the task of answering tough questions. Was Pearl’s Jewish identity a motive or justification for his murder? How accurate was French philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy’s allegation of ISI involvement? Was 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s claim to have personally killed Pearl credible?

The 20 students mined the Internet, tracked leads overseas, obtained top-secret documents, interviewed U.S. officials and charted the complex web of suspects. By the seminar’s end, they had learned the identities of all but four of the 19 suspects still at large. This year, under the auspices of the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, DC, Nomani and researchers drawn from the seminar have continued the investigation. The Pearl Project plans to release its report in early 2009. “If we can understand this case,” says Nomani, “we can understand some of the challenges of ideological hatred and animosity.

“The darkest interpretation of Islamic theology sent me into the abyss through Danny’s murder,” recalls Nomani. “I realized that as long as moderate-minded people like me didn’t challenge radical and violent interpretations of our faith, they would prevail. Everybody in every faith has to stand up for principles of moderation, inclusion and tolerance if we stand a chance of defeating principles of violence, intolerance and injustice.”

Like Mariane Pearl, Nomani now has a son—Shibli Daneel, age six. “In Shibli’s name I have sought to bridge the divide between Jews and Muslims that manifested itself in Danny’s death,” she says. “I hope he can inherit a sense of the courage and moral clarity with which I believe his Uncle Danny lived.”

Adamant that Pearl would not have wanted this project to be just about him, Nomani envisions the Pearl Project as a long-standing, collaborative class at Georgetown where students investigate the deaths of journalists around the world and confront challenges to free speech.

“I believe in journalism as Danny believed in journalism,” Nomani explains. “I believe in it as a critical element of having progress in society. You stand up for goodness or you don’t, you’re kind to others or you’re not, and we’ve still not figured that out as a global civilization. The principles for which we have to stand are simple. That’s what the Pearl Project is about, standing up for truth.—Jeremy Gillick