by Zak Ebrahim
I’ve only met my grandmother a few times in my life because she was so appalled when my mother converted to Islam. She apparently meant it when she said my mother wasn’t welcome at her house wearing some goddamn scarf on her head. For my mother, though, love and loyalty transcend everything. And it turns out that, in the midst of my grandmother’s decline, a strange, fortuitous thing has happened. If you ever need proof that bigotry is nothing but a trick of the mind, here it is: Because of her strokes, my grandmother has forgotten, utterly and in an instant, that she hates my mother’s religion and abhors my mother for choosing it. And prejudice is not the only bad habit my grandmother’s brain has let go of: She’s also forgotten that she had smoked for fifty years.
• • •
Before the summer ends, some of my Busch Gardens buddies and I take a long lunch and check out a roller coaster called Montu. The ride’s named after an ancient god of war who was half man and half falcon. It’s in a part of the park called Egypt, which strikes my funny bone in just the right way. It rises like a sea monster up over palm trees and Middle Eastern–themed shops and faux sandstone ruins covered in Arabic. (The Arabic cracks me up: it’s all gibberish.) My new friends and I climb into the coaster. Nobody can shut up. They’re arguing about what Montu’s coolest feature is: is it the seven totally intense inversions? Is it the wild-ass zero-G roll? Is it the out-friggin’-rageous Immelman loop? They can’t decide. They want me to cast the tie-breaking vote, but I have no idea what they’re talking about because there’s one more thing we’d never experienced in our Islamic bubble—real live roller coasters!—and I’m scared out of my mind.
We’re towed up to the first crest and released into what feels like a free fall. For a solid minute, I cannot even open my eyes. When I do, I see my friends’ faces. They are shining with happiness. I gaze out over Egypt. The Serengeti plain. The parking lot. Then we hurtle into the zero-G roll at sixty miles an hour, and there are three questions pinging in my mind: 1) Are my shoes going to fall off? 2) If I throw up, will the vomit travel up or down? and 3) Why didn’t anyone take just a couple of seconds out from telling me who I was born to hate and mention, even in passing, that roller coasters are the coolest things in the world?
My mind flashes back to my very first memory: my father and I spinning in the giant tea cups at Kennywood Amusement Park, in Pennsylvania. I was only three at the time, so I really just remember flashes of light and bursts of color. One moment does come back, though—my father laughing, standing up in the tea cup and shouting a familiar prayer: “O Allah, protect me and deliver me to my destination!”
My father lost his way—but that didn’t stop me from finding mine.
11
Epilogue
I’ve written so much about prejudice in this book because turning someone into a bigot is the first step in turning him into a terrorist. You find someone vulnerable—someone who’s lost his confidence, his income, his pride, his agency. Someone who feels humiliated by life. And then you isolate him. You fill him with fear and fury, and you see to it that he regards anybody who’s different as a faceless target—a silhouette at a shooting range like Calverton—rather than a human being. But even people who’ve been raised on hate since birth, people whose minds have been warped and weaponized, can make a choice about who they want to be. And they can be extraordinary advocates for peace, precisely because they’ve seen the effects of violence, discrimination, and disenfranchisement firsthand. People who have been victimized can understand more deeply than anyone how little the world needs more victims.
I know that systemic poverty, fanaticism, and lack of education make the kind of transformation I’m describing a staggering long shot in some parts of the world. I also know that not everyone has the moral fire of Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, or Martin Luther King, Jr.—I certainly don’t—and that not everybody can convert suffering into resolve. But I’m convinced that empathy is more powerful than hate and that our lives should be dedicated to making it go viral.
Empathy, peace, nonviolence—they may seem like quaint tools in the world of terror that my father helped create. But, as many have written, using nonviolence to resolve conflicts doesn’t mean being passive. It doesn’t mean embracing victimhood, or letting aggressors run riot. It doesn’t even mean giving up the fight, not exactly. What it means is humanizing your opponents, recognizing the needs and fears you share with them, and working toward reconciliation rather than revenge. The longer I stare at this famous quote by Gandhi, the more I love how steely and hardcore it is: “There are many causes I would die for. There is not a single cause I would kill for.” Escalation cannot be our only response to aggression, no matter how hardwired we are to hit back and hit back harder. The late counterculture historian Theodore Roszak once put it this way: “People try nonviolence for a week, and when it ‘doesn’t work,’ they go back to violence, which hasn’t worked for centuries.”
• • •
I stopped taking my father’s calls when I was eighteen. Every so often, I’ll get an e-mail from the prison in Illinois saying that he would like to initiate correspondence. But I’ve learned that even that leads nowhere good. My father’s been appealing his convictions forever—he thinks the State infringed on his civil rights during the investigation—so one time I e-mailed him and asked, flat-out, whether he murdered Rabbi Kahane, and whether he participated in the plot to attack the World Trade Center in 1993. I told him, I’m your son and I need to hear it from you. He answered me with an indecipherable, high-flown metaphor that had more twists and turns than the roller coaster at Busch Gardens. It made him seem desperate and grasping. Not to mention guilty.
Kahane’s assassination was not just hateful, but a failure as anything other than simple murder. My father intended to shut the rabbi up and to bring glory unto Allah. What he actually did was to bring shame and suspicion onto all Muslims, and to inspire more pointless and cowardly acts of violence. On New Year’s Eve in 2000, the rabbi’s youngest son and daughter-in-law were killed—and five of their six children wounded—when Palestinian gunmen fired machine guns into the family’s van as they made their way home. Another family destroyed by hate. I felt sick with sadness when I read about it.
I felt sicker still on 9/11. I sat watching the footage in our living room in Tampa, forcing myself to absorb the unfathomable horror of the attack—and struggling with the devastating feeling that I was somehow complicit by blood. Of course, the pain I felt was nothing compared to the pain of the true victims and their families. My heart still breaks for them.
One of the many upsides to not speaking to my father anymore is that I’ve never had to listen to him pontificate about the vile events that took place on September 11th. He must have regarded the destruction of the Twin Towers as a great victory for Islam—maybe even as the culmination of the work he and the Blind Sheikh and Ramzi Yousef began years earlier with the yellow Ryder van.
For what it’s worth—and I’m not sure what it is worth at this point—my father now claims to support a peaceful solution in the Middle East. He also claims to abhor the killing of innocents, and he admonishes jihadists to think of their families. He said all this in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2013. I hope his change of heart is genuine, though it comes too late for the innocents who were murdered and for my family, which was torn apart. I don’t pretend to know what my father believes anymore. I just know that I spent too many years caring.
As for me, I’m no longer a Muslim and I no longer believe in God. It broke my mother’s heart when I told her, which, in turn, broke mine. My mother’s world is held together by her faith in Allah. What defines my world is love for my family and friends, the moral conviction that we must all be better to one another and to the generations that will come after us, and the desire to undo some of the damage my father has done in whatever small ways I can. There’s one remaining vestige of my own religious education. Whenever I read online about some new act of evil, I instinctively hope against
hope that it isn’t the work of Muslims—the many peaceful followers of Islam have already paid a high enough price for the actions of the fundamentalist fringe. Otherwise, I put people before gods. I respect believers of all kinds and work to promote interfaith dialogue, but my whole life I’ve seen religion used as a weapon, and I’m putting all weapons down.
• • •
In April 2012, I had the surreal experience of giving a speech in front of a couple hundred federal agents at the FBI headquarters in Philadelphia. The Bureau wanted to build a better rapport with the Muslim community, and the agent in charge of the campaign had heard me advocate for peace at his son’s school, so there I was—feeling honored, but nervous. It was a daunting crowd. I started with a joke (“I’m not used to seeing so many of you at once—usually I deal with you two at a time”), which was met with confused silence and then a pretty good laugh, for which I will be forever grateful. I proceeded to tell my story, and to offer myself up as proof that it is possible to shut one’s ears to hatred and violence and simply choose peace.
After my talk, I asked if there were any questions, and there weren’t. That seemed unusual, but maybe the FBI agents were too nervous to raise their hands? Anyway, I said, “Thank you very much for having me,” and the crowd clapped and began to disperse. And then something nice happened, which has always stayed with me: A handful of agents formed a line to shake my hand.
The first few agents offered polite words and firm grips. The third one, a woman, had been crying.
“You probably don’t remember me—and there’s no reason you should,” she said. “But I was one of the agents that worked on your father’s case.” She paused awkwardly, which made my heart go out to her. “I always wondered what happened to the children of El-Sayyid Nosair,” she continued. “I was afraid that you’d followed in his path.”
I’m proud of the path I’ve chosen. And I think I speak for my brother and sister when I say that rejecting our father’s extremism both saved our lives and made our lives worth living.
To answer the agent’s question, here is what happened to the children of El-Sayyid Nosair:
We are not his children anymore.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To my best friend, Sharon. Words cannot adequately express all that you’ve given me. You’ve been everything. Saying “This wouldn’t have been possible without you” is an understatement. Thanks, buddy.
Thank you to Robin and Warren, our dynamic “god parents,” who provided us with amazing guidance and their ridiculous wealth of knowledge.
To my mother, who instilled in me a love of reading that benefits me every single day. I don’t know how you got us through it all. To my loving sister, for always being there. To my brother: the bond we’ve shared since we were kids will be with me forever. You are the coolest person I know.
Thank you to Frank, Vera, and Frankie.
Thank you to my dear friends in Pittsburgh—Holly and Doug, Mike and Chad, Mark and Tracy, Mike and Betsy, Jeff, Kate, Kaitlin and Alisa, Knut, Cathy and Colin, and Mike and Jules, for your amazing support, and for making me realize how big my family really is. Go Steelers!
Thanks to my Philly friends—Jasmine, and my oldest friends Orlando, Jose, and Suboh. Bill and Cathy for having my back, Special Agent JJ, Alexander and Fin (even though you’re Flyers fans), JDKC, Laura V, Marilyn and Elaine, Rabbi Mike, Alex, Rabbi Elliott S., Dave, Pastor Scott H., Brian, Lisa, Pod, DC Jenny, Colleen and Michael, Bob, Heather and Bill, and to Charlie, who always said I needed to do a TED Talk.
I would like to convey my gratefulness to those who supported me throughout my journey: Emily, Sarah, Martina, Jesse, Kathleen, Barbara, Danielle, Marianne, Masa, Todd, Mary Lowell, Michael, Troy and Abed, and to the many people not mentioned who gave me strength and courage along the way.
An enormous thank-you to Jeff Giles. You have been a pleasure to work with, and I’m so thankful for your help with crafting my thoughts into a coherent format. I would like to express special gratitude to Michelle Quint for her positive energy and editorial expertise. My deepest thanks and appreciation to Deron, Alex, June, Ellyn, and everyone at TED for believing in my message. Much appreciation to Carla Sacks for her guidance. Finally, I am very grateful to Chris Anderson for believing that I would not crumble under the pressure of opening for Bill Gates and Sting.
Thank you all.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
© RYAN LASH
ZAK EBRAHIM was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on March 24, 1983, the son of an Egyptian industrial engineer and an American schoolteacher. When Ebrahim was seven, his father shot and killed the founder of the Jewish Defense League, Rabbi Meir Kahane. From behind bars Ebrahim’s father, El-Sayyid Nosair, co-masterminded the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Ebrahim spent the rest of his childhood moving from city to city, hiding his identity from those who knew of his father. He now dedicates his life to speaking out against terrorism and spreading his message of peace and nonviolence. In 2013, he participated in TED’s talent search in New York City, and was selected to speak at the main TED Conference the following year. His TED Talk was the inspiration for this book.
A portion of the earnings the author received to write this book have been donated to Tuesday’s Children, a nonprofit organization helping communities affected by terrorism around the world.
Learn more about Tuesday’s Children: www.tuesdayschildren.org
JEFF GILES is a journalist and novelist based in New York. He has written for The New York Times Book Review, Rolling Stone, and Newsweek, and served as a top editor at Entertainment Weekly. His first novel for young adults will be published by Bloomsbury in 2016.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
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Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Zak-Ebrahim
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Jeff-Giles
WATCH ZAK EBRAHIM’S TED TALK
Zak Ebrahim, author of The Terrorist’s Son, spoke at the TED Conference in 2014. His 9-minute talk, available for free at TED.com, was the inspiration for The Terrorist’s Son.
go.ted.com/ebrahim
PHOTO: JAMES DUNCAN DAVIDSON
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