Looking closer as I turned up Thirteenth Street, I noticed a small sign near the entrance identifying the building as Annoor Mosque. A sign at the entrance to the parking lot made it clear that the mosque was private property, under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Not exactly a welcome mat, I thought, but not surprising. U.S. incidents of anti-Muslim vandalism, harassment, and violence—already higher since 9/11—had tripled in 2016, I had read, egged on by the anti-Muslim rhetoric of Donald Trump and other presidential hopefuls. College students in Tucson had flung trash onto a mosque from the balconies of their luxury apartment tower. Yahoos in Georgia held a march in Atlanta at which they brandished loaded rifles and burned copies of the Quran, causing me to wonder how they’d feel if a band of armed Muslims gathered to burn copies of the Bible.
As I stepped onto the property and approached the entrance, I wondered if my progress was being tracked on a series of video monitors. The mosque had better security than the Body Farm, I realized, but that probably made sense: Although it was possible for an intruder to steal members of my flock, it wasn’t possible to wound or kill them. A scrap of dialogue from The Revenant popped into my head, and in one of my bizarre flights of fancy, I imagined one of my corpses repeating the line to some malevolent midnight intruder: I ain’t afraid to die anymore. I done it already.
The mosque’s door, a windowless steel slab, was locked. I rapped on it, gently at first, then, when there was no answer, hard enough to sting my knuckles. Behold, I stand at the door and knock, I thought, with a mixture of hope and irony. Finally, my knuckles aching, I noticed the doorbell, and pressed the button. I looked up then, directly into the lens of the surveillance camera, and gave an awkward wave, plus what I meant as a friendly, trustworthy smile. My greeting must have passed muster, for a moment later, the doorknob turned and the door opened.
I stepped into the entry hall and was met by two young men. The one who had opened the door was brown skinned—Indian, perhaps—and the other was pale. Both were shoeless, and both were guarded looking. Following their footwear example, and prompted by the tall racks of cubbyholes on either side of the foyer, I removed my rubber-soled Merrell Mocs to indicate respect, then began talking, looking from one dubious face to the other. “Hello,” I began. “My name is Dr. Bill Brockton. I’m the head of the Anthropology Department at the University of Tennessee.” Something flickered in the face of one of the young men—the slight, brown-skinned one—so I focused more of my spiel on him, hoping he might be more receptive, although for all I knew, what I’d seen was a flicker of resentment. “I’m working on a forensic case—a murder, unfortunately—involving what we think was a young Muslim man. The victim was about twenty, and he was killed by someone who might have been a white supremacist.”
The two young men—both of them around the same age as my victim, as best I could tell—looked at each other in apparent alarm, though I couldn’t tell if their alarm was focused on the crime or on me, the bearer of evil tidings. “We think the victim was killed several months ago,” I went on, “sometime during the summer. Trouble is, we’re not having any luck identifying him. We’ve checked missing-person reports from all over the country”—I kept saying “we” rather than “I,” in hopes of making it clear that I wasn’t a solitary lunatic—“but we can’t find a single report of a young Muslim man who’s gone missing.”
The pale one—a large young man, easily six inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier than I—said, “Excuse me. Let me make a call.” He pulled out a phone, stepped away from me, and spoke softly for several minutes. Finally he returned and handed me the phone. “It’s our imam,” he said. “He’s the one you need to speak with.”
I took the phone from him to speak to the mosque’s leader. During the brief pause after I told him my name and title, he said, in a formal, careful voice, “I am familiar with who you are.” His voice surprised me. He didn’t sound Middle Eastern; he sounded southern, and black. After my initial surprise, though, I felt stupid: Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar were far from the only African Americans to convert to Islam; for all I knew, there might be millions of other black Muslims in the United States.
In any case, taking the imam’s words as a hopeful sign, I repeated what I’d told the young men, adding, “I’m here to ask for help identifying this young man. I’m hoping that you, or someone else at the mosque—or one of your colleagues at another mosque—might know of a young Muslim man who’s missing.”
He was silent for a moment, then he spoke slowly. “I’ll need to ask around and get back to you. You must understand that an imam doesn’t always know everything about every member of his mosque. I can’t be the imam of just a few people. I have to be the imam of all. And that means keeping a certain distance. So I don’t always know what’s happening in the lives of individual members of the community.”