Across the Great Divide

"I have a very faint memory of a compartment," Ahmed recalls. "Greenish light. When the train slowed down you were supposed to switch off the lights, so as not to attract attention." As they felt the train stop, the children, warned to keep silent, hid by sliding beneath the sleeping berths. Nothing was stranger, for a 4-year-old, than to see his peaceful father clutching a pistol in the dimness.

No one boarded the train, as it happened. But more dislocation awaited in Karachi, where Muslim refugees soon poured into their home, set up tents on the lawn. "In the corridor, there was a huge tin trunk and on top of it, a young man used to sleep," Ahmed remembers. "He must have lost his entire family in the partition, because he was all alone. He never talked or interacted with anyone. He lay on this trunk like a corpse, with a white sheet over his head."

For years afterward, as Ahmed excelled at elite schools and English universities and became an anthropologist, the refrain stayed with him: Hindus had done this. If you saw a snake and a Hindu, you should kill the Hindu first; the snake was less dangerous. Perhaps his desire for interfaith dialogue first germinated in London, where he was shocked to meet Hindu classmates raised on precisely the same bitter accusations about Muslims -- down to the snake.

Instead, he put his energies into writing well-received anthropological books and into his civil service career in Pakistan, until a couple of events changed his course.

His father, "the one person in the world I felt really understood me," had been urging him to write about Islam, but he'd resisted. "Look, Daddy, I'm not an Islamic scholar; I'm a scientist," he argued. "Let the mullahs talk about it." But in 1981, when Ahmed was at Princeton, he called home and heard "the most unexpected news of my life": His father had died. When a colleague wandered into his campus office and asked what he was working on, Ahmed replied in a daze: a book about Islam.

"You're not an Islamic scholar," she protested.

"I'm becoming an Islamic scholar."

The result, Discovering Islam, was published in 1988, just as Ahmed arrived in the United Kingdom to teach at Cambridge, and just as the fatwa against Salman Rushdie created a sudden demand for someone articulate and urbane to explain Islam. A few years later, the book became a BBC series that Ahmed hosted, making him something of a celebrity -- "probably the world's best-known scholar on contemporary Islam," the BBC said last year.

And then, if one believes in a guiding hand that causes odd confluences of events (Ahmed does), consider this one: After years of interfaith activity in Britain, after leaving his ambassadorship ("all diplomats have to get up and, in a very smooth and charming way, tell lies") and resigning from the civil service, after another year at Princeton, he accepted an offer to teach at American University -- and arrived in the U.S. capital weeks before September 11, 2001. "Since then until today," he says, "I don't think I've had a peaceful 24 hours."

By now, his life is an interfaith dialogue. He's perennially maneuvering disparate people into the same room by, say, accepting a speaking engagement at a tiny Iowa college ("I was the first Muslim they'd ever seen") or bringing South Asian Muslims from a State Department seminar to a Passover seder. It requires faith in small victories.

At 61, Ahmed remains the cautious diplomat, but it's clear that he's appalled by the consequences of the U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq; every bomb that falls on Muslims, he says, strengthens the appeal of Osama bin Laden. As a South Asian, he's avoided wading squarely into the Arab-Israeli conflict but laments the way it's damaging relations between Islam and Judaism. Nothing he sees on CNN makes him sanguine.

But a letter from Britain's chief rabbi, praising his latest book, does. "We have trouble, we have hate, and then we have these wonderful moments that really make us human, that inspire us," he exults, showing off this prize.

"Dr. Pearl is one of those wonders."

JUDEA AND RUTH PEARL are sitting in their garden in suburban Encino on a day when the sunshine splashing down on lemon trees is a potent reminder of why people move to Southern California. It's also reminiscent of Israel, where they met as engineering students.

All these years later -- he's 67 -- Judea retains an Israeli informality. With an undisciplined beard and lively eyes behind utilitarian glasses, he's wearing a T-shirt and sweat pants. He sounds Israeli, too, his swallowed-R accent still strong, though he's lived in the United States since graduate school and became a citizen in 1971.

His grandparents helped found a sandy little village near Tel Aviv called B'nai B'rak. Family legend says that his grandfather, assaulted by thugs in Poland, announced to his family, "Start packing, we're going home." In the last moments of his life, Danny Pearl volunteered his family connection to B'nai B'rak -- proof, to his father, that he was speaking of his Jewishness not under duress but with defiant pride.

Judea dislikes discussing the details of what he usually calls "the tragedy" or "the disaster." It's intensely painful, and it focuses attention on how Danny died when the family's goal -- since establishing the Daniel Pearl Foundation within days of his death -- is to talk about how he lived. Still, even when no one is asking, the grief and the questions persist.

"How brave do you have to be to kill a single noncombatant?" Ruth Pearl demands, pondering anew why extremists targeted her son.

Judea shrugs. "The more cruel you are, the more powerful you are perceived to be."

As a child in what was then British Palestine, Pearl remembers Jewish and Arab kids playing together in the orchards and fields. Yet he also recalls air raid sirens sounding as intense violence erupted after the establishment of the new Jewish state in 1948. Soon the Arabs, "all our friends who used to come to the village with their donkeys and their fruits, they simply disappeared, overnight." Within a few years, Pearl was in the army, patrolling the Gaza border. He considers himself lucky that he used a weapon only once -- and that the nighttime intruder, subsequent investigation showed, was a fox.

Such war-and-peace issues receded for several decades, though he still had family in Israel and visited frequently, as he pursued a career in the sciences. His wife and children understood that, while he won top prizes for work on probability and causality, Dad wasn't likely to notice when the car needed servicing.