Grounded in belief

ON Judgment Day, screenwriter Kamran Pasha believes he will be accountable -- not only for how he kept his faith but also for how he used his talent. Those same motivations might drive another Muslim as far away from Hollywood as he could get, yet Pasha spent most of the past year helping pen Showtime’s “Sleeper Cell,” an action thriller about an American Muslim who infiltrates an L.A.-based terrorist cell.

The nine-part miniseries, which debuts tonight, stars Oded Fehr as Farik, the disciplined, stone-cold leader of the cell, and Michael Ealy as Darwyn, a warmblooded, jazz-loving Muslim and undercover FBI agent. The other international members of the cell include Christian (Alex Nesic), a French skinhead; Ilija (Henri Lubatti), a war-ravaged Bosnian; and Tommy (Blake Shields), the son of a Berkeley professor.

As the members plot the destruction of local landmarks, they are shown performing religious rituals, dealing with sexual desire, and disciplining one another for infractions of their moral code. Along the way, they run into other Muslims who illustrate current issues: a USC student reluctantly recruited to import chemicals for a dirty bomb; a soldier who secretly trains would-be insurgents; a visiting Yemeni scholar who argues that the Koran forbids terrorism.

As the sole Muslim on the six-member writing team, Pasha hoped that by fleshing out the characters drawn to violence, he would be able to make nuanced distinctions for the public between them and mainstream Muslims like himself. Four years after 9/11, Americans are not only ready for three-dimensional portrayals of terrorists, they are “starving” for them, Pasha said.

While movie houses are showing politically themed films (“Syriana,” “Paradise Now”), television hasn’t strayed far from the villainous Muslim characters shown on shows like “24.” Until “Sleeper Cell,” TV hadn’t seen a Muslim hero. Pasha said he and “Sleeper Cell” creators Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris agreed early on it would be crucial to show what motivated the terrorists.

“It is not helpful in this war on terror to fight a plastic enemy whose motivations you don’t understand. If you don’t understand them, you can end up playing into their hands without even realizing it,” he said.

The eloquent and friendly Pakistani-born Pasha, who grew up in Brooklyn and holds degrees from Dartmouth, Cornell and UCLA, said he’s never met a terrorist. At 33, the son of struggling immigrants, he attends the Islamic Center of Southern California regularly but doesn’t always accomplish the traditional five prayers a day. He leads an ordinary writer’s life, working until 5 a.m., sleeping until noon, tapping out scripts on his laptop at Urth Caffe on Melrose.

Research and his own understanding of the issues led him to trace terrorists’ anger to underlying social or family dysfunction as well as sociopolitical or economic issues.

“In the show, these people don’t come from normal families,” he said. “They may appear prosperous and integrated into the community, but there is usually something wrong in their immediate environment that is feeding their anger. And then the political view becomes the excuse.”

The dramatic terrain is tricky, however -- the public doesn’t want to like terrorists -- and Pasha is already dealing with criticism from reviewers, what he calls “Islamaphobes” on the Web, and fellow Muslims. They complain:

* In fleshing out the terrorists, he has made them sympathetic.

“I think that’s a canard,” he said. It’s like ‘The Sopranos.’ You may come to like some of these characters, but you don’t like when they strangle somebody with their bare hands.”

* Some characters, like the French-born Christian, are not believable.

“What we’re seeing in France [last month’s immigrant rioting in suburban Paris] is not that unbelievable,” Pasha said. “The character is extremist by personality. He falls in love with a Muslim woman and converts to Islam, but his character hasn’t changed. He’s not going to find the Islam of [13th century Persian poet] Rumi very attractive.”

* Some religious arguments come off as unnatural and didactic. For example, in Episode 4, which Pasha wrote, Christian argues with the Yemeni scholar about the nature of jihad: Christian maintains that holy war must be waged against unbelievers, while the scholar teaches that the highest jihad is waged against one’s own misguided aggression. “It is a challenge,” he said. “You don’t want to be preachy. There was a danger of doing the ‘West Wing’-type analysis of terrorism while people are running around shooting things. I think we handled it properly. When debates happen, they happen in very contentious and emotional situations.”

Fellow Muslims’ reactions

PASHA said some Muslims who have seen advance screenings have had a “here we go again” reaction to scenes in Episode 1 that depict a father’s “honor killing” of his teen daughter.

And Pasha said he was also troubled by the pilot, written before he joined the show. “I had difficulty with it, but I thought, ‘We’re not saying all Muslims do this. This guy did this. If he’s in contact with people like these Al Qaeda guys, he’s already on the fringes of Muslim society.” That said, Pasha added that if he had been on the job then, he would have argued against portraying an honor killing.

But surprisingly, the strongest criticism from Muslims has not been that they are portrayed as terrorists but that the hero has sex outside of marriage. “In mainstream American culture, premarital sex is pretty much the social norm. It’s not the social norm among Muslims. It happens, but it is not something that is openly talked about,” Pasha said.

When his Muslim friends tell him he is corrupting religion, he replies, “I am showing human beings in all their complexity with what some of us consider to be moral flaws. Frankly, it makes better drama.” At the same time, he said he always shows that the behavior deviates from the ideal and that the consequences can be dire.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for Pasha was having to put forth the terrorists’ point of view in the writers’ room. “I felt I had to explain why so many Muslims all over the world are frankly sympathetic to the insurgents. It’s very difficult to try and explain the mind-set and not just say these are evil people.

“In the room, I felt I had an obligation to explain how someone could believe that and not be crazy. That could be very difficult for me, arguing points of view I don’t believe in because I felt I had to represent a whole civilization.”

As a child growing up in Brooklyn, Pasha absorbed TV images of Muslims as villains and endured taunts from schoolmates who assumed he supported terrorism. At some point, he said, he realized he could “sit there and keep absorbing that and be different, or I can take this back, stand up to people who are bigots here, and do that out of my faith.

“At the end of the day, I am a believer, I take my faith very seriously and I do believe I will be morally accountable after I die. If I can do something to fight terrorism and educate my fellow Americans about my faith, then I feel I’ve used the talent in some way that’s of value.”

At the same time, Pasha said he also wanted to remind fellow believers who feel victimized by outsiders of their religion’s tenets.

“This show allowed me to reassert to Muslims: You are morally responsible. And that’s not self-righteous outsiders preaching at you. That’s your own faith,” he said.

He doesn’t always want to write about Islam, said Pasha, who is working on several movie scripts of his own. He plans to “keep plugging away in this town,” aiming to become a mainstream television producer.

As far as his next step is concerned, he said, “I’m hoping, praying, the show is renewed.”