I was worried about Serial. Even before I knew it would be a series, I was worried that the same anti-Muslim bigotry that had colored this murder case fifteen years ago would again be front and center when the world considered the State vs. Adnan Syed.

In 1999 Adnan, the subject of Serial, was arrested for the murder of his ex-girlfriend. A 17-year-old American boy of Pakistani descent, Adnan was my younger brother’s best friend. Adnan also came from a close-knit Muslim community in Baltimore, and a deeply faithful family.

Adnan was a typical teenager. He was Homecoming King, a football and track athlete, and an honor roll student. And he was also dating, smoking weed, drinking, and hiding things from his parents. He lived the life the children of many immigrant and religious families often do. He was not a devout, observant Muslim as a teenager (how many teenagers are that deeply religious?), and he had last visited Pakistan as a ten year old. He could barely speak Pashto, the language of his parents.

But when he was arrested, his typical teenage ways would be construed by the State as nefarious.

From the investigation to the bail hearing to the trial itself, Adnan’s ethnicity and religion was raised hundreds of times.. Adnan was portrayed as living a suspicious “double-life”- lying to his family while indulging in Western ways. The crime itself was framed as an honor killing — the victim, Hae Min Lee, had broken up with Adnan, and he killed her as revenge for diminishing his honor. He had no history of violence and not a single witness would testify that he had ever been abusive towards Hae, but it didn’t matter. His religious background substituted for such a history — his religion made him predisposed towards violence against women.

This was 1999, and the axe of 9/11 had not yet cleaved American Muslims from the rest of the American public. Still, the bigotry based on anti-Muslim stereotypes existed in the Western psyche. And it was palpable I sat with the community listening to tortured direct and cross examination about the ways in which Muslims prayed, the direction in which they prayed, the gender dynamics of the mosque, and dozens of other irrelevant Islam-related questions designed to “otherize” Adnan, his family, and his supporters. The optics were certainly not in our favor, as a majority black jury sized up the rows and rows of bearded men and women in shawls sitting behind Adnan every day.

An important point to note about the religious and ethnic connotations pervasive in the trial is that they weren’t all about Adnan and his background. The key witness in the case was a young black man, and the victim was a Korean-American. Three different minority communities with heir own stereotypes were in the courtroom, and the State was masterful at identifying them and using them to its advantage.

There was little need for racial codes in this trial — the stereotypes were not implied, they were overt. The bias was blatant, unhidden. As a community we had no idea how fight back, we had not yet articulated the phenomenon of Islamophobia, or organized against it. Adnan was doomed.

Fifteen years later, as I awaited the launch of Serial, the anxiety I felt during his trial reappeared. During his incarceration Adnan had become a deeply religious person. While he looked like a typical American kid in 1999, today he looks like the archetypical Muslim man — full beard, skullcap, pants rolled up above his ankles. And I, his advocate, am a Muslim woman in a headscarf.

What would the reception to these obviously observant Muslims be? Would it become the filter through which the public examined the case, much like the jury did all those years ago?

It came as a surprise that there was virtually no attention given to the fact that Adnan is a Muslim as the podcast went on, although looking back I should have known better. The unique aspects of the story itself, the crime, the “characters”, the mishandling by police, prosecutors, defense lawyers, these were the issues capturing the public’s imagination.

Serial was heard by millions of people every week for over three months, yet from online forums to major publications, Adnan’s religion was almost always addressed in the context of how it was used against him.

Overwhelmingly, the public’s reaction has been disgust of the bigotry that fueled the case.

It has been a breath of fresh air for someone like me, who has spent years talking about Islam and Muslims to diverse audiences, to now write and speak without my “Muslim” hat on. Because of this case, and the Serial story, made it clear that religion had nothing to do with the murder of Hae Min Lee.

Adnan in 2001. Photo courtesy of the author.

I’ve received messages from thousands of people, both Muslims and non-Muslims, noting how Adnan’s story has humanized Muslims for an international audience in a way that PR campaigns never could. Foronce, a devoutly religious young Muslim man was the center of a story with no connection to terrorism, a story that elicited global support and empathy for him and his family. It has been a great sigh of relief to me that people are seeing the injustice of the case, with little regard to Adnan’s religion and ethnicity.

A French journalist commented to me, upon reflecting what made Serial so successful, that Adnan himself was the most interesting character and accounted for the public fascination. I found this remark odd, considering I didn’t think Adnan’s voice was heard much during the show itself, and didn’t believe you could really know or understand him from the heavily edited interviews they aired. The journalist went on to explain that everything about Adnan flew in the face of what people expected.

That’s when it clicked for me. I understood his implication. While there had been an explicit rejection of “trying” Adnan in the media and public by holding his religion against him, there was still a subconscious expectation that he would sound or be a certain way as a Muslim. He had ended up seeming perfectly relatable, average, “normal”.

After over a decade of war against Muslim majority countries and increasing anti-Muslim sentiment in the US, Adnan’s humor, candor, and ordinariness deconstructed stigmas about Muslims, “our” men in particular. This was a large part of what made Serial fascinating.

Likewise, messages and online chatter about my own personality, my ability to write, speak, push back, even get angry and curse online in my more regrettable moments became a source of interest for people. I have not acted the way people expected a Muslim woman to behave. I like to think this is a good thing, because I hope that people can realize how Muslims are rather than how we are presumed to be.

In a recent interview the prosecutor who helped to construct the case as a Muslim honor killing commented that the crime was in fact a run-of-the-mill domestic violence case. It’s a clever thing to do, to recast the case in light of the public reaction to the bigotry of Adnan’s trial.

As we get closer a new trial after a successful appeal, I feel confident that this time Adnan will be on trial, but his religion and ethnicity will not be. And I hope that Adnan’s story marks a turning point in the negative perceptions of Muslims, as people across the US and Europe feel perfectly comfortable rooting for a faithful, practicing Muslim man.