Although a Saudi terrorist was saved from the death penalty by the deadlock of a New York jury yesterday, American Muslim leaders said the man's trial still posed difficult political and religious questions.
Islamic law sanctions capital punishment for murderers, and dozens of people are executed every year in Muslim countries for committing serious crimes. According to a recent national poll, American Muslims overwhelmingly support the death penalty for heinous crimes, at least in the abstract.
But a death sentence in a case involving interpretations of Islam could have been polarizing and deeply troubling for many.
"Emotionally, it's easier to accept the idea of a Muslim in prison than the idea of a Muslim killed by a non-Muslim state," said Khaled Abou el Fadl, a professor of Islamic law at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law. "That would be far more alienating. It forces you to take a position, while a life sentence doesn't necessarily do that. You can say, `Maybe if he's innocent, God will reveal something in the future that will help him out of his predicament.' "
On a gut level, where political perceptions and grievances may rule, some Muslims may still have misgivings about even the less drastic punishment of life in prison for Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-'Owhali, who was convicted of murdering 213 people in the 1998 bombing of the American Embassy in Nairobi.
"I don't think there has been a lot of in- depth thinking about this, but superficially, emotionally, there's probably going to be a knee-jerk response," said Nazir U. Khaja, a California doctor who is a former president of the American Muslim Council, in an interview before the verdict. "In a fairly large number of minds in the Muslim community there is the feeling that we are not treated fairly. So, unfortunately, people will right away say, `We identify with him as a Muslim.' "
It is not that anyone would condone the slaughter of innocents, Muslim leaders said. Rather, reaction to the trial and the sentence is filtered through the prism of Muslim suspicions that Americans are biased against them and their religion.
Professor Abou el Fadl, for instance, said he had heard a litany of complaints about this and past terrorism trials from his Muslim students and from others he meets in the mosques and community centers where he lectures. They criticize the absence of Muslims on the juries. They think prosecutors perpetuate false stereotypes of Muslims as bomb- carrying killers. And in a handful of mosques, some conspiracy theorists have insisted to him that the embassy bombers are not Muslim at all but pretended to be to give Islam a bad image.
"In my experience, there is distrust in the Muslim community toward what are often called political trials," he said. "It's not that people say, `Oh, if this was an Islamic legal system, it would be fine.' It's that they don't trust the judge and jury to give Muslims a fair shake in a case that involves the particularity of Islamic identity."
Islamic jurisprudence, developed in the early centuries of the 1,400-year-old religion, is based on the assumption that those who judge are Muslim, as are those who write a society's civil and criminal laws. It does not deal with the situation of Muslims living in pluralistic secular societies like the United States.
There is little but anecdotes to go by in gauging the sentiment of American Muslims toward the embassy bombing trial and its verdicts. But one of the few available polls on Muslim attitudes in this country suggests that on most questions of social policy, they are very much within the American mainstream.
A survey of 502 American Muslims, conducted a year ago by Zogby International, found that 75.4 percent of those surveyed said that the death penalty is a fitting punishment in the case of "heinous" crimes, compared with 75.2 percent for Catholic respondents, 81.2 percent for Protestants and 67.3 percent for the Jews.
In the same poll, just under 35 percent of Muslims said they had experienced discrimination. Far fewer Christians said the same, although nearly 59 percent of the Jews polled reported experiencing prejudice.
The margin of error for the American Muslim segment of the poll was plus or minus 4.5 percent.
The number of Muslims in the United States has been growing. Although there are no official tallies, Muslim organizations have variously estimated the population at two to seven million.
Outside the United States, the bombing trial received scant coverage in the Muslim world, although the belief that Americans are prejudiced against Islam runs deep. In most Arab countries, the semiofficial press studiously avoids covering an event that might give Islamic militants a platform to express their views, which usually include condemnations of all Arab leaders.
But from the point of view of Mr. al- Owhali's fellow extremists, the sentence could be a disappointment, since life in an American jail is seen as a demeaning existence.
"He will still gain sympathy in some quarters for the simple fact that he was convicted in the United States," said Mohammed Salah, an expert on fundamentalist movements and a reporter for the pan-Arab daily newspaper Al Hayat in Cairo. "But he would be a hero if he was sentenced to death."
Such is the case for Omar Abdel Rahman, the Egyptian cleric who was tried in New York in 1995 and is serving a life sentence for plotting to blow up New York landmarks.
From jail, the cleric still occasionally issues religious rulings and is venerated by some of his fundamentalist followers. But they have split into quarrelsome factions in his absence and American Muslims have essentially ignored efforts by the cleric's supporters around the country to protest his prison conditions.
"If Omar Abdel Rahman had been sentenced to death instead," Mr. Salah said, "this would have opened the doors of hell against Americans."