Why did they send him to Syria?

Nearly 15 years ago, a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, was forced by Syrian prison guards to live in a dark, three-foot-wide, six-foot-deep underground cell where he spent his days alone, listening to the screams of other tortured prisoners. He was often taken out for beatings with an electrical cable and threatened with worse.

Arar, who was born in Syria, had been secretly turned over to the notoriously brutal Bashar al-Assad government in 2002 by U.S. authorities, after he passed through John F. Kennedy International Airport on his way home to Canada from a business trip to Tunisia. It was the height of post-9/11 anxiety, and U.S. authorities suspected he had ties to al Qaeda, which he strongly denied.

After 10 months in prison, however, the Syrian government released him, saying they found no evidence of any ties to terrorism. Canada, which had worked hard with human rights groups to secure his release, set up a commission to investigate the Arar case. It officially cleared him of wrongdoing and found that the United States had relied on faulty intelligence to justify its rendition.

Before Arar’s life was upended at 32 years old, he was a husband with two young children who was laser-focused on his career in computer engineering. He was entrepreneurial and dedicated, singularly focused on his own success and future. Nearly a year in a Syrian prison didn’t steal those dreams, but it did readjust his priorities. He no longer wants to build a business just for the money or personal gain. He wants to create something with purpose. His bio on Twitter says: “Let us together make the world a better place to live in.”

He’s strived to let go on any animus. He attributes his ability to forgive to his Muslim faith and to his effort to understand what happened to him from the perspective of the U.S. government.

“That’s how I get my inner peace. Sometimes I try to put myself in the shoes of the people who sent me to Syria,” he said. “After all, it’s their country, they have to protect it, they can’t take a chance. That it is how I accept what happened to me. Regardless of what injustice was done to me this is the best way to understand human beings, you have to understand what their pains are, what solution they are trying to look for.”

“This is extremely powerful,” he added. “Once you put yourself in the shoes of others, you’ll be much more motivated to forgive.”