I did not allow any look to pass across my face, but my insides had turned to jelly. I did not know what I had expected. The imams exercising their spiritual authority, perhaps, the Sunni over the Shia. Talking. Reasoning. But as the baker seemed to shrink inside his clothes, I saw fear in his eyes. I could smell it on him, a metallic tang. He said something else to Abdul Rahman. I couldn’t hear what exactly, but it was something very humble. They continued talking, but I do not remember what else they said at that moment—only my own trembling amazement at the power of the imams.
“I will take care of this today,” the baker finally said to Abdul Rahman. Now he turned to me, his face a salad of anxious kindness. “Come back here tomorrow,” he said. “I will make sure my son apologizes to you…Would you like something to eat?”
I shook my head and looked down at the flecked tile floor. All I wanted to do was go home. This was more than I had bargained for.
I did not know it was only the beginning.
4
Iskendar, the Kurdish bully, had beaten me up many times, and I knew where he lived. Abdul Rahman insisted that I tell him. After a short walk, we arrived at a shanty house—bits of plywood and tin pieced together to extend a small house sitting on a corner. Thin strips of nailed tin held the wooden door together. Abdul Rahman stood before me and rapped twice on it. The rest of the imams formed a crescent behind me.
The door cracked slightly and a woman’s face appeared, her hijab exposing the front of her hair in the style of the Kurds that my mother thought brazen. In the woman’s face, I could see echoes of the bully’s bone structure—the wide cheekbones, the forehead that jutted too far forward in its skin.
“Yes?” the woman said, revealing gold among her upper teeth.
“We are the imams of the mosque. We want to speak with your son,” Abdul Rahman said.
“He is not here,” the woman said, opening the door a little wider. She wore a long skirt made of a patchwork of fabrics, some in screaming prints like the Gypsies wear. Most of the Kurds were poor immigrants who had come to Lebanon illegally from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq seeking any kind of work they could get. Their homes and clothes were often makeshift, cobbled together from whatever could be had cheaply.
“What do you want with my son?” the woman said.
As he had at the bakery, Abdul Rahman put his arm around my shoulder and ushered me forward. “This boy belongs to us. And your son beat him up today.”
The woman looked down at me, seeming to catalogue the injuries on my face. Then she looked back at Abdul Rahman. “If my son beat him, the boy must have done something to deserve it.”
“Deserve it?” Abdul Rahman said, biting off the words. “He deserves to be beaten every time he passes this way?”
His voice grew louder, and I could see from the corners of my vision that passersby had stopped to listen. Abdul Rahman spoke as if the woman was dust. “This is not even your country, and your son pretends to guard a territory here?”
A shadow play of emotions flickered across the woman’s face: disdain, the dawn of understanding, then panic. Slowly, she pulled her arm from behind the door. In her hand, she held a stick.
“Get away from my house! Get out of here!” she shouted, waving the stick and salting her words with curses.
From behind her, I heard a guttural yell and saw movement. A worn print drape that served as an interior door was swept aside. Out came Iskendar, waving a banana knife. Instantly he spotted me standing on the sidewalk.
“So you have come to cause me trouble? You have broken into my house! Now I will cut you!”
“That is him!” I shouted, pointing and backing away. “He is the one!”
Abdul Rahman did not hesitate. He flung the door wide with his right hand, pushed the woman aside with his left, took three steps forward, and kicked the boy straight in the gut. A noise of wind escaping, and Iskendar collapsed on the concrete floor.
The woman screamed. “Don’t hurt my son!”
The Abus now crowded into the tiny space. A single raw lightbulb swung over their heads, throwing wild shadows onto the fruit box slats that patched holes in the woman’s walls.
“Please! Please don’t hurt my son!”
But Abdul Rahman swooped down and snatched the banana knife, and the imams were on Iskendar like a pack of wolves, kicking and kicking, each blow lifting his body off the ground. Their fury terrified me. To the imams, this was not only an issue of territory; this boy was a Kurd, which meant he was no better than a dog.
The beating I got was nothing like he got.
Wham! Blood burst from his nose in a stream as one man’s foot crashed into his face. Instantly, the skin around his eyes turned red, then purple.
Wham! Burgundy patches bloomed in Iskendar’s dark hair, matting it together in stringy ropes.
Wham! His face went slack, then pale underneath the bright scarlet of his wounds.
His mother screaming, screaming, drawing a little knot of Kurdish neighbors who did not dare interfere.
My own heart screamed inside me. One part of me was glad for vengeance, but the savage assault horrified me. Part of me was proud to have champions. Part of me wished I had never run into the mosque.
In a low voice like thunder, Abdul Rahman bent and spoke into the boy’s bloody ear: “If you ever threaten this boy again, we know where you live. We know who your mother is. And we know the police. I will call them myself, and they will deport your filthy little clan back to whatever Iraqi cave you crawled out of.”
“My son will not touch your son!” the woman cried. “We only want to make a living. I promise this will never happen again!”
Now Abdul Rahman tangled his fingers in Iskendar’s hair and jerked his head off the pale yellow concrete. He laid the blade of the banana knife against the boy’s cheek and pressed the tip into his nose. Terror shot through my belly—I was afraid Abdul Rahman was going to cut the boy’s face, a permanent symbol of Sunni victory and Kurdish shame.
“Apologize to this boy,” Abdul Rahman said. “Right now.”
A sob of fresh hope burst from the woman. “Yes! Tell him you’re sorry! Ask him to forgive you!”
Revulsion seized me as a slimy swirl of spit, blood, and mucus streamed from the boy’s mouth and nose, and he blubbered through it. “I’m…sorry….”
Then I saw that his eyes were dry. No tears, no remorse, no defeat. From beneath battered, swollen lids, his eyes pierced mine with a gunmetal glint. Only his mother and I were in a position to see it. A new wave of fear rolled through me.
Abdul Rahman dropped Iskendar’s head, and it thumped on the floor. Then, in a flourish of robes, the imams sailed out, like a storm cloud that has fired its lightning bolts and spilled its rain.
5
The sun had come out, playing among fat white clouds, sucking the water off the pavement. Still carrying the Kurdish boy’s banana knife, Abdul Rahman walked at my shoulder, hurrying me along. I could feel a charge in the air, a spark snapping among the imams, as though they had drawn energy from the violence.
Because of that, I did not tell Abdul Rahman about the look I had seen in the boy’s eyes. I was afraid he might go back and kill him.
When we reached the Armenian neighborhood, I saw a group of boys standing in front of a cadout, a gift shop that sold decorative items like statues and bowls and figurines. I recognized the ringleader, and as we approached, he recognized me. Like leaves in a wind gust, the boys scattered.
“Was that them?” Abdul Rahman asked me.
After seeing what the imams had done to Iskendar, I was afraid to answer. But how could I now turn against these men when they had become my defenders?
“Yes,” I said.
Abdul Rahman ushered me along faster. When we reached the door of the gift shop, he did not slow down but entered in long strides, extending his arm and raking an entire shelf of merchandise off onto the floor. The crash filled my ears as crystal and ceramic pieces shattered against the tile.
A dark, curly-haired man ran from the rear of the store. “My shop! What are you doing!”
“Infidels!” Abdul Rahman roared. “You are picking on a young Muslim boy, a son of Allah! Why don’t you come and deal with us?”
“What are you talking about!” the shop owner roared back. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” He surveyed the sparkling mess on the floor, and rage simmered on his face.
Abdul Rahman advanced a step toward him. “Those kids outside. Every time this boy walks through your neighborhood, they beat him. This is a Christian crusade against us! You lose your country, and now you are coming to possess ours!”
“Those kids are not mine! They were just standing in front of my shop!”
Outside, I heard raised voices, and when I turned to look, my stomach flipped. Five or six Armenian men had come running, armed with sticks and pipes. Behind them, I saw two of the boys who had beaten me.
A woman’s voice came from somewhere above, a window or a balcony. “The police! Someone call the police!”
Abdul Rahman barreled out the front door, robes flying, and surveyed the area like an emperor. “Yes, call the police!” he bellowed toward the upper floors of the surrounding apartment houses. “Let me show you what I will do while the police watch me do it!”
The imams waded in among the Armenians like sharks among minnows. Suddenly, in my mind, a puzzle piece snapped into place: Abdul Rahman and the other imams were trained fighters. Abdul Rahman swept the banana knife in wide arcs, forming around himself a protective space. One of the Abus—Azziz, I think—now revealed himself a martial artist, delivering a straight-armed blow to the throat of a blond Armenian man. I stood beside the shopkeeper gaping. The dozen men tangled before me, a savage knot of flailing arms and legs. Each time Abdul Rahman whirled in my direction, I saw madness in his eyes.
Then one of the Armenian boys picked up a rock and hurled it, striking Abdul Rahman in the chest.
Time froze. A warble of sirens broke the air. In seconds, two Jeeps carrying paramilitary police arrived amid a whir of engines and squealing brakes. Four officers with automatic rifles spilled from the vehicles and waded in to separate the fighters.
“Who would like to explain this?” a man with many decorations on his shoulders demanded.
Abdul Rahman spoke up immediately. “This boy belongs to us,” he said, nodding his chin toward me.
I now hoped the earth would crack open and swallow me whole. The police will have my name forever, I thought. They will think I’m a criminal.
“Every time he comes through this neighborhood, the Armenian boys beat him!” Abdul Rahman spat out. “We try to live in peace with you, and this is what you do to us!”
“Which boy beats him?” the police commander said.
“Many of the boys! All of the boys!” Abdul Rahman said. “Especially that one.” He pointed at the boy who had thrown the rock at him.
The police commander closed the distance to the boy in three long steps, drew back his arm, and delivered a rough slap across his face. A spot of blood appeared on the boy’s lip. The commander drew back his arm and delivered another blow. Now blood trickled from the boy’s nose in a scarlet stream.
This violence shocked my sense of fairness. Did not the policeman want to hear the Armenians’ side of the story?
“You did this, and your neighborhood doesn’t deserve this trouble!” the commander bellowed at the boy. “You don’t know who these people are. You’re going to get yourself killed! You’re going to get your family killed!”
Suddenly, I realized the policeman was protecting the boy. All of the Armenians. He was showing the Muslim Brotherhood that he would take care of the problem, that there was no need for retaliation. With a bloody nose as a deposit, the policeman was buying this boy a future.
Houston, Texas
2007
I was sitting in the Houston airport browsing Internet news when I spotted an Associated Press item out of Cairo: “Two lawmakers from the banned Muslim Brotherhood were arrested Wednesday, officials said, in an intensifying crackdown on the nation’s most powerful opposition movement.”1
State security forces, the news story said, had stripped the two men of their parliamentary immunity, accusing them of participating in the Brotherhood’s illegal activities: “Authorities have increasingly clamped down on the Islamist group since December including sending 40 of its top financiers and businessmen to a military tribunal on charges of money laundering and supporting terrorism.”2
The Brotherhood does more than support terrorism, I thought. They are its lifeblood.
Among the groups and factions in which I had moved as a jihadist, it was well known that most Islamic terror groups have at least some roots in the Muslim Brotherhood, or al-ikhwān. The Brotherhood, the Muslim imitation of European fascism, had been around since 1928, founded in Egypt by Hassan al-Banna, a schoolteacher. The Brotherhood has always been strongest in Egypt, but it spread rapidly through other Muslim countries, setting up its Lebanon chapter in 1936.3
The Brotherhood is a Sunni movement with a stark and violent credo: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” As a young boy rescued from ethnic street violence, I drank in this teaching in all its simple, childlike clarity. The teachings of the Brotherhood gave me power, authority, and ultimately, a gun.
As a young man, I imported this credo to America. I was not alone. During the late 1970s, I was among a wave of Middle Eastern students who washed on to American shores, carried along on oil money and easy visas. We were the first wave, the vanguard, planting the seeds of jihad with groups like the Muslim American Youth Association (MAYA). It was easy for me to connect with MAYA because some members believed—and still believe—the same thing I did: that the Western world is evil and must be destroyed. MAYA held U.S. conferences that attracted Islamist groups who openly proclaim their hatred for the Jews, for Christians, and for America.
At a MAYA conference in 1994, a man named Bassam al-Amoush was delivering a fiery message when someone interrupted him to hand another speaker a note. “We have good news,” the speaker proclaimed. “A Palestinian policeman has carried out a suicide bombing in Jerusalem. Three were killed and fifteen wounded. Hamas claims responsibility for the incident.”4
The crowd erupted in rapturous chants: “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar.”
Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, an Islamic cleric from Gaza, founded Hamas in 1987. It is the same Hamas written about in today’s newspapers, with terrorists blowing up civilians in the Middle East and Europe. And it is the same Hamas that now has organized cells in Tucson, Houston, and New York City, as well as Columbia, Missouri; Springfield, Virginia; and Santa Clara, California.
Sheikh Yassin designed Hamas on the model of the Muslim Brotherhood.
I closed my laptop and scanned the airport waiting area. When I came to this country, there were only a handful of mosques in Houston. Today, there are more than eighty. There in the airport, several groups of Middle Eastern men and women sat or stood in groups, the women revealed by their hijabs, the men by their general look.
How many Kamals are there in this group? I wondered.
A better question: how many Kamals were in the group of young men I had seen in the Atlanta airport in 2006 chanting, “Khaybar, Khaybar, ya Yahud! Jay’sh Muhammad saufa ya’ud!” Khaybar was an ancient battle in which Muhammad’s armies annihilated some Jewish tribes. The chant taunts the Jews and warns them that “the army of Muhammad will return!” Among the Atlanta travelers, I had been perhaps the only one who understood that these young men were chanting a jihadi death song to Jews in an American airport.
No matter how many terrorist acts are carried out by young Middle Eastern men, it is a cultural taboo for an American to sit in an airport and wonder whether the young Middle Eastern men they see are terrorists. This is why radical Islamists love America: she has replaced
her generosity toward all cultures and religions with an unquestioning embrace of “multiculturalism.”
We like to think the best of our neighbors. A lot of people thought of Mohammed Atta as a fine young neighbor. That was just before he and eighteen friends killed nearly three thousand people using passenger jets as missiles. It is good to think well of our neighbors, but that does not mean we should be willfully blind to the historical demographics of jihad.
Which is why I was sitting in the Houston airport on my way to a string of speaking engagements in the Carolinas. My topic would be the same as it was in California, Michigan, Colorado, and elsewhere: America has an enemy within her walls. People who are like I was. Islamists working as taxi drivers and grocery clerks and university professors. People who are planning attacks such as those exposed by the American government since 2001:5
• May 2002: Jose Padilla, an American citizen accused of seeking a “dirty bomb,” was convicted of conspiracy. Padilla, a former member of a Chicago street gang, attended a mosque in Fort Lauderdale with Adham Amin Hassoun, an illegal in the United States who was later charged with providing material support to terrorists. In other words, a man like I used to be.
• September 2002: Six American citizens of Yemeni origin were convicted of supporting Al Qaeda. Five of the six were from Lackawanna, New York.
• June 2003: Eleven men from Alexandria, Virginia, trained for jihad against American soldiers. They were convicted of conspiracy and violating the Neutrality Act. One of the men, Randall Todd Royer, was a former spokesman for the Muslim American Society, which claims to be a “charitable, religious, social, cultural, and educational” organization.
• August 2004: James Elshafay and Shahawar Matin Siraj planned to bomb New York’s Penn Station during the Republican National Convention. Elshafay was a nineteen-year-old American high school dropout recruited into jihad by a person like I had been. Siraj was a twenty-two-year-old Pakistani national who had been in the United States illegally for six years.
The Blood of Lambs: A Former Terrorist's Memoir of Death and Redemption Page 7