The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas

by Anand Giridharadas

  Not long after Halperin began thinking up his Stroman panel, an activist friend of his asked if he would meet a nice young man who wanted to see him. The young man soon e-mailed and then paid Halperin a visit in his office suite. The visitor was short and slender, with a prominent nose and thinning hair. Half of his face was covered with bumps, and his right eye was gently adrift. It was a strange coincidence. His name was Rais Bhuiyan, and he was the man Mark Stroman had shot. He, too, wanted the professor’s help.

  AFTER THE HAJJ, Rais had dropped his mother back in Bangladesh and returned to Dallas. The new stirrings within him, to do something for others, grew stronger still, but he couldn’t figure out what the something was: “My heart is telling me that, Rais, now you are in a better shape, because all this time you’ve been struggling to survive, to come to better shape. So now you’re in a better shape—physically, mentally, financially. And now you came from Hajj, and you had a promise to God that you want to do something. So why I’m waiting more? Why don’t I start right now? Who knows when I’m going to die? Because we don’t know that when our time will be over.”

  He felt his vision growing wider than ever before. He was filling up with questions: How can I make the most difference? How can I use my talents? Whom will I need to know? Whom can I serve? Where do I begin? He considered himself “just a normal human being, a very, very poor and normal human being, a simple ordinary person.” If he was going to achieve anything for others, he would have to do his homework and choose carefully.

  Thus Rais spent a good part of his free time in 2010 online. Many ideas came to him. He thought about starting a charity focused on the developing world’s poor. He thought about doing something to aid other victims of hate crimes, to speak and lobby on their behalf. He researched the case in which he had become entangled, studied victims-rights policies in Texas, examined case law, perused the sites of peace groups and other civic organizations doing all manner of social work around Dallas, poked around the pages of Muslim groups.

  Rais worried that his knowledge of how to get things done in America was very limited. “It’s not like I was born here, I know the culture, I know the people,” he said. “So I had to go through a learning process to understand how things work here. Am I doing the right thing? Or am I going to make people pissed off or upset by doing this kind of thing? Because I had no idea.”

  He needed guidance and direction of a kind the Internet couldn’t furnish. Rais needed, he realized, to network. So all that year he did. Community meetings. Peace conferences. Political fund-raisers. Human-rights dos. If Dallas hosted it in a ballroom with stackable chairs, Rais attended it. Here, too, he sensed his skills lacking, but he tried to learn: going up to people he figured were important, telling them his story, asking advice if they seemed open to him. He carefully followed what he perceived to be the American rules—for example, giving people only a hint of what you do the first time you meet, then hopefully running into them again at another event and making a fuller-court press. “You don’t really give them a lot of information the first time,” Rais said. “You don’t want to make them panic. It’s also creepy—that, ‘Why this guy is talking everything at the first point?’ That was a learning curve for me. Because in this culture, this is how it is practiced. Even if you like someone, a girl, you don’t just tell everything about you the first moment, right?”

  Rais followed this precise approach when meeting Hadi Jawad. Jawad was a respected elder in the Dallas peace community, a seasoned activist quick to call a march or lead a delegation. Rais knew of Jawad from his research and ran into him one day at a fund-raiser for Farouk Shami, a Palestinian American personal-care tycoon who had parlayed his claim to have invented the world’s first ammonia-free hair dye into a run for governor of Texas. When Rais first met Jawad, he told his story, to which Jawad intently listened. As it happened, the two met again on the Dallas circuit, a short time later, at a Muslim Legal Fund of America event. Rais now moved in. He told Jawad he’d been wanting to do something for others out of gratitude to his God, and he had an intuition that this something he was after should have to do with the man who attacked him. He wanted his service, whatever it was, to involve Mark Stroman.

  It was, to say the least, an unlikely conclusion. Nevertheless, over these months Rais’s exploration and reflection had converged in one particular theory: of all the things he could do, intervening in the cycle of mistrust and enmity between his religious community and his adopted country—between Islam and America—would be the most valuable. “Hate is going on in this country since 9/11,” he said. “And where this hate is taking us? Nowhere. Our life is becoming more and more miserable every single day since 9/11. It has to end somewhere.” After his long research, Rais had decided to devote himself to helping to bring about that end.

  He realized, the more he read, that he was seeking the impossible—to change deep habits that stretched back far beyond the present conflict. “If you look at the history, starting from the native Indians, what they went through; then the blacks, what they went through; the Irish—all those potato-famine people, they came to this country—what they went through; then during the Second World War, what the Japanese went through,” Rais said. “And after them you see what the Jews went through. What the Arabs, they went through in this country, what the Latinos are going through, and now the Muslims are going through. It’s like, you see, a pattern—that a group of people is always under the bus. And another group of people is waiting in the pipeline.”

  Rais continued, “I’m saying it not out of my anger, but I see the pattern. We have a long history of hate and violence. I think the time has come to stand up and say enough, because at the end of the day we’re all Americans living in this country. Why can’t we stop that cycle? That’s why I think this message is very powerful, because we have to end this cycle. The cycle is going on starting from the day the country was built.”

  When Rais shared some of his thinking with Jawad at the fund-raiser, the activist was taken by this young man and his strange idea. You have to meet Rick Halperin, Jawad said.

  So now here Rais was. Since the encounter with Jawad, Rais’s idea had developed further. He had started to focus on the possibility of forgiving Stroman as the centerpiece of his approach. Was this not what the Prophet had done when the citizens of Ta’if attacked Him? Was this not the logical implication of what Rais’s mother had always taught him about mercy? Was this not what God had been trying to whisper in Mecca, by smashing Rais’s nose, then healing it? Rais felt an urge, from the deepest place within, to forgive. He felt that it would cleanse him somehow, and of course multiply the God-given frequent-flyer miles of an imperfect man. He also had the feeling that forgiving Stroman, so close to the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, might nudge Americans to look anew at the notion of mercy—and reflect on their own thirst for vengeance.

  From there, the idea continued to blossom. For a man as furiously ambitious as Rais, forgiveness—simply to excuse—began to feel necessary but insufficient. To forgive was almost an absence—to declare the passing of bad feelings. That was fine, but God hadn’t saved Rais Bhuiyan just so that, all these years later, he could tell some deadbeat man, “Now it’s OK.” When the saving had happened, he remembered what he’d told himself—that he should “do something better and bigger not only for myself, for others as well,” that he should educate the Americans: “There are so many things they can do, but they’re not seeing because of their lack of self-esteem or lack of stamina, lack of energy—lack of something. But if you can fulfill that side of whatever they’re lacking of, it will be a life of worth.”

  Ever since his arrival in America, a part of Rais—at first a small part, swollen by time—had wanted to grab these people, shake them by the shoulders, and wake them from their misery and depression and self-loathing and family-breaking and money-grabbing and loneliness and violence. He wanted to tell them: “Look, why you guys are still suffering? If I can overcome, if I can turn around
my life, with the mercy of God, in this country, from that negative point to this point—you guys are born here, you guys speak better than me, you understand the culture better than me, you have more networks, more resource. Why can’t you stay in the same place—even going down day by day? Why you have to struggle on a regular basis, just to survive?”

  He wanted, he said, to save them from childhoods with “no peace at home”; from an idea of life centered on “sex, alcohol, and drugs, starting from your teenage until when you grow up”; from people staying poor “generation-wise because of lack of education”; from members of an overclass that “never even know what is happening in the poor people’s life”; from “lack of in-touch with family”; from stressed and fragmented parents, “busy with their own lives,” who tell their young to “just feel comfortable, just make your life happy” and thus nudge them toward things like drugs; from people who are “free, but the way they’re living their life, they’re losing their freedom.”

  “If I can do, you can do,” he wanted to tell them. These words were not a criticism of the country at large, because the country had served him so well. They were a criticism of how other people made use of the country. Now that he was ready to do something big, now that he had this kernel of an idea of forgiveness, now that he saw a chance to intervene in the stalemate between Islam and the West, he wanted also to stay true to this vision of waking his countrymen up.

  With these ideas swirling within him, Rais inched toward his epiphany: he would first forgive Stroman before all the world, and then he would wage a struggle to save Stroman’s life.

  The idea verged on the bizarre, but it fulfilled many of Rais’s desires: to apply Islam in the fullest way; to show the faith at its best to the Americans; to practice the mercy his mother had counseled all his life; to get great PR for the cause of ending the cycle of hatred; to spare another man that horrid feeling of impending death that Rais had known himself. There was another motivation, too, which Rais wouldn’t have come to but for a class he once took at the University of Texas at Dallas with Kevin Mitnick.

  Mitnick was a reformed computer hacker who now taught computer security. He had flipped and, in flipping, done a lot of good for the technology world. He had, to Rais’s mind, done more good than he would have done had he been good from the start. “Who can teach better hacking than Kevin Mitnick?” Rais said. He dreamed of making Mark Stroman the Kevin Mitnick of American chaos, of degeneracy, isolation, and hate. He imagined a radical act of forgiveness and a battle for Stroman’s life that would turn that ex-warrior into a symbol of better ways of being.

  “I did not see him as a killer or a murderer,” he said. “I looked at him as a human being like me. Yes, definitely he made a terrible, terrible mistake and crimes. But we all make mistakes. We are not angels. We’re human beings that make mistakes, and there are some human beings that learn from others’ mistake and some learn from their own mistakes. Mark’s definitely the head of a horrible crime. But I thought if he was given the chance, he might become a spokesperson. He might warn people: ‘What I did, don’t do that.’ And who could do better than Mark Stroman?”

  Sometimes Rais imagined himself as a speaker on a dais somewhere, at the kind of event he had spent that year attending, talking about hate crimes and relations between Islam and the West. Midway through his speech, he would unveil a surprise: Mark Stroman, ladies and gentlemen, is now joining us live via Skype from prison! “You could ask him any question you want—how powerful that would be,” Rais said. He even found himself imagining what Stroman would say: “Guys, I’m still behind bars. I’m not in the free world. What I did, that was wrong, and I’m grateful that I was not executed. But now I’ve dedicated my life for educating people.”

  Rais said, “If I go and talk to rednecks, if I go and talk to white supremacists, do you think they’re going to listen to me?” He could imagine Stroman lecturing on so much—hatred, parenting, sex, drugs: “If he used his own terms, the way he talked, his local Texan terms, people will listen to him more than if I go and talk to them with my foreign accent.”

  It was a curious, stunning vision—and, whether or not Rais would admit it, a vision befitting all the things he complicatedly was: his ambition and selflessness, his piety and sense of specialness. Here was a way to be everything at once: to cast himself as the Dallas metroplex’s prophet of mercy, and yet to be, as his mother had taught him, one step behind others, a servant rather than master.

  PERHAPS IT WAS his long habit of reinvention that primed Rais to forgive. Perhaps he could leave behind the grudge of those pellets in his face because he had left so much else—left so many things that in the moment seemed total and unleavable. His family, his mother, his Abida; the Air Force, New York, the food mart, Salim; the Olive Garden and Zale and the various employers who got him on his feet. His life was measured in leavings. He could pick up and go with a lightness not available to men like Stroman. He could be this, then that, then something else, without suffering loss. It has been true of many of the millions who over the years have made themselves Americans.

  History felt heavier to Stroman. It had been that much harder for him to escape it: the circumstances of his birth, his parents, the nightmares, the early bad choices that narrowed the spectrum of future choices, jobs that felt designed to keep you right where you were. When this was your destiny, prestige and self-belief came from holding on—to the past, to a sense of tradition, to where you belonged before Johnny-come-latelies like Rais showed up. Think of how Stroman had reassured Michael in his letter that Dallas, the only city he knew in Texas, was Texas’s best city. To another, less tethered being, it might seem like a contradiction, because bestness implies comparison. But for the anchored who had only their anchors, the best city was the one that was yours: the one whose back streets you memorized as a boy, whose traffic reports you yearned for in prison.

  There was, for a man like Stroman, no tension between the specialness of a place and one’s lack of exposure to other places. To love a place was an act not of judgment but of commitment. It was like loving your mother, not choosing a wife.

  Stroman called himself a biker even though he perhaps never owned a bike. Here, again, pause and suspend judgment, because there is another way to see it: as a commitment, a statement of belonging and tribe and fellowship. What Stroman was really saying when he called himself a biker was that he was a certain kind of person and that others of his kind had his back. He wanted you to know that without having to spell it all out.

  The past and his oases of belonging were just about all Stroman had—especially now, living in prison. In this he was not so different from the more reverent and rooted countrymen whom Rais had left back home in Dhaka, who would have lacked the stomach for his adventures and gambles.

  On the Row but also for many years before, Stroman had been stuck in the ditch of his own past. He had a forward visibility of inches. Rais’s visibility stretched out for miles. He nodded to his past, his heritage, his faith. But nowhere did he dwell more comfortably than in his own, incandescent future. He was one of those men who value themselves not by what they’ve held on to but by what still looms. The ambition swelling within him now was to save a life that had been so profoundly unlike his own.

  PROFESSOR HALPERIN COULDN’T believe his good fortune. Sitting before him was a devout Muslim who was saying, if he understood him, that he wanted to take on the Texas death establishment and promote to Americans the idea of mercy. “He said he wanted to lead an effort to try and save Mark Stroman’s life, and could I help or how could I help him or would I help him,” Halperin recalled. He told Rais about the panel in the works—and the coincidence of receiving that inquiry from Stroman some time ago, then planning to trigger a discussion using his case, and now meeting his victim.

  Rais arrived with no specific ideas about how to save Stroman; that was why he’d come to the professor. Halperin, for his part, had learned to temper his hopes of interrupting the state’s mac
hinery of execution, because it almost never stopped grinding. But the professor had been around long enough to perceive in Rais a rare opportunity. The case didn’t implicate one or two of Rick Halperin’s pet causes; it seemed to implicate nearly all of them. It provided a new weapon to deploy against the death penalty. It argued for religious toleration, by portraying Islam in a way that would surprise many Americans, as a religion of mercy. It was a natural gateway to a larger conversation about America’s response to 9/11, and the other ways it might have answered the attacks. And the case forced one to think again about the meaning of patriotism after a decade of chest-thumping and fear-mongering.

  “I thought that his story was profound and compelling,” Professor Halperin said. “Here’s somebody who happened to be a Muslim, who was the survivor of a hate-crime rampage based on the worst crime in America since Pearl Harbor, talking about forgiveness, compassion, and healing.”

  Halperin added, “I don’t know any other story that would raise the issues to make America look at itself the way this case does.”

  ON THE SECOND Thursday of every month, Chapter 205 of Amnesty International, representing Dallas, met on the SMU campus. Halperin had long been involved with Amnesty, and he invited Rais to come to the February meeting, to share his story and his big idea.