Dec. 10, 2005
St. Petersburg Times
Sami Al-Arian’s daughters Laila, 23, Leena, 20, and his son Ali, 15, try to stay focused on their lives through the ups and downs.
By Vanessa Gezari
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At 7:36 a.m. Thursday, a day and a half after the verdict, Laila Al-Arian sat with her legs tucked under her on the green leather couch in her parents’ living room, talking on her cell phone to a radio station in New York.

She wore navy sweat pants and a pale zip-up sweat shirt. She was such a practiced spokeswoman by now that she could check e-mail while she listened to the interviewer’s questions.

“Yeah definitely, it’s a huge relief,” she said into the phone. “We’re very happy.”

That was true, or mostly. Since a jury acquitted Sami Al-Arian of nearly half the terrorism charges against him and deadlocked on the rest, his family had veered between elation and anxiety. They wanted to savor the victory, but they knew it wasn’t over.

Would the prosecutors retry him? Would the government deport him? Would the press twist their words, or would someone, hearing the radio or reading the newspaper, mistake their message? The jury had found Al-Arian guilty of nothing, but some still publicly condemned him. On Tuesday night, when his wife and daughters arrived home after the verdict, bouquets of roses waited on their doorstep. In the papers the next day, editorials accused him of hate.

In his family’s lives, as in the community, the ground was still shifting. To them he had always been innocent, but the verdict had not brought them peace. They were up and down, calm one minute, tense the next.

On Thursday morning, Laila drew her hair back in a ponytail and put on wire-rimmed glasses. The host from WBAI kept calling her Lailani. She laughed when interviewers made mistakes, not having had much chance to make them herself. She was 23, a journalism student at Columbia University. Someday she wanted to cover the biggest stories in the world, maybe report from the Middle East.

She had thought about choosing a new career. She worried she’d always be more famous than the people she was covering, she’d always be Sami Al-Arian’s daughter.

“I would see people and that’s all they would think,” she said.

But the verdict had done more than banish her pounding headaches. She thought maybe now people would begin to see who she really was: a girl who grew up obsessed with the New York Knicks, who speed-walked the long New York blocks, joked in Arabic, devoured celebrity gossip and liked Hemingway because he could convey emotion without spelling things out.

“You just want to be your own person,” she said. “A complicated human being like everyone else.”

She had to catch a plane to New York. She changed into a pink cowl-neck sweater, wrapped a pink scarf around her hair.

“I’m going to miss my flight,” she yelled to her 20-year-old sister, Leena, who needed a ride to the University of South Florida library.

“Okay, God!” Leena yelled back.

Rain pelted the windshield. Their mother, Nahla, took a call from her lawyer and turned on the radio.

The highway was a sea of brake lights. Leena had books to read and papers to finish. Nahla wanted to have breakfast with a friend.

“Don’t put stress on me,” Nahla said. “I already have enough.”

“No, you’re putting stress on me,” Leena said.

“Good,” Nahla snapped. “You’re younger. You can take it. You are going to USF after I finish my plan, okay?”

Laila said something in Arabic.

Leena shot something back.

“Leena!” her mother said.

“I don’t care,” Leena murmured, slouching lower in the back seat, her body shrinking into the folds of her maroon sweat shirt. “I don’t care. I don’t care.”

Since the verdict, they had thanked God dozens of times. If anyone had perspective, it should have been them. But all those months in court, they came home and bickered around the dinner table, and now was no different.

Leena held onto her anger. When an acquaintance they hadn’t seen in months offered congratulations, Leena wondered, where were you before? She felt that her father had been wrongly accused, that the government had stolen years of their lives, and who knew what would happen next.

“Don’t be bitter,” Nahla had told her after the verdict.

“I will be,” she had said.

Nahla pulled up in front of the red terminal. Laila got her bag out of the trunk.

Nahla turned to Leena. “Hug her.”

“I don’t want to.”

Laila blew a kiss from the curb and hurried inside.

In the USF library, Leena found a seat on the third floor. She had been a student at USF, where her father taught, when he was arrested. She didn’t want to run into anyone she knew.

Now she was at the University of Chicago studying for a master’s in Middle East studies. She had two papers due the day after the verdict, and when the professor e-mailed to congratulate her, she asked for an extension.

Her blue Puma backpack held stacks of photocopies and a book about the prophet Mohammed’s life, but she didn’t start reading right away. Instead, she typed an e-mail to a Chicago think tank. She wanted an internship.

“I found your organization to be suitable for my career aspirations,” she wrote. It had been a while since she allowed herself to think about aspirations.

“I never set long term goals, because we didn’t know what was going to happen a week from now,” she said.

In the last 45 hours, the future seemed to be opening again. She used to feel guilty about leaving the house. Suddenly, she and Laila were talking about buying cheap tickets to London over spring break.

Her view of the last three years was changing, too.

“Even though we did feel as if we were standing still,” she said, “I think maybe we weren’t.”

She plugged in her headphones and listened to Abdul Halim, a gentle-voiced crooner who sings in Arabic. She marked sentences with blue highlighter. She typed, turned back to her notes.

In Temple Terrace, Nahla prayed and left to pick up her 15-year-old son.

“I got a 93 on the chemistry test today,” Ali said.

“That’s because you were tired,” Nahla said. “Usually you ace it. You know to me 93 is not good.”

After the verdict, Ali wanted to hear Pearl Jam. He played Rearview Mirror, a song about how much clearer your enemy is when he’s behind you. He listened to Given to Fly, about a guy who gets wings and escapes trouble.

“I feel like I can actually breathe normally now,” he said.

He stayed up until 2 a.m. the night of the verdict to finish his homework, and when he woke four hours later he wasn’t even tired. During the trial, he struggled to concentrate on the structure of human tissue, the Byzantine Empire and quadratic functions, but his mind wandered. Now he felt himself listening again, absorbing what the teachers said.

After dinner, he went to his room to study with a friend. They had an exam in world history.

“Ali, come here!” his mother called.

“What?”

“Check the county jail,” Nahla said, her voice thin and strained. “I’m scared they’re going to send Sami somewhere.”

Ali Googled the Orient Road Jail. He typed in his father’s name. Still there.

“Alhamdulillah!” Nahla said. Thank God.

She scrubbed dishes. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I made a mistake.” She was thinking about an interview she’d done earlier. The reporter had asked if Al-Arian would still be an activist when he got out.

“Maybe I should have said “by peaceful, nonviolent means,”‘ she said. “I don’t know why – is it the weather? – I don’t know why I feel so nervous.”

She left for the jail. In his bedroom, Ali picked up a big, red history textbook. He and his friend got out their notes and divided up the questions.

“How did the neolithic agrarian revolution transform the material life and social organization of human communities?” his friend asked.

Ali lay on the bed. He opened a notebook, picked up a mechanical pencil.

“The neolithic agrarian revolution transformed them by means of causing civilization to adopt sedentary agriculture,” he wrote, “staying put and becoming crop-based.”

It was almost 7. At the jail, his parents were about to start their visit. Ali lay on his stomach, one leg crossed over the other. The pencil scratched across the page. He wrote neatly, his letters small and regular.

He could hear the dull roar of cars outside. In the hallway, the washing machine chugged. The apartment smelled of roasted chicken. Ali yawned and kept working.