The Terrorist’s Son (2 page)

She and Ibrahim are brought in through an entrance at the far end of the hospital. On the way to the elevators, my mother peers down a long hallway, freshly waxed and gleaming under the stark lights. She sees a mass of people clamoring to get through security. Reporters are shouting questions. Cameras are flashing. My mother feels clammy and weak. Her head, her stomach, everything starts to rebel.

“I'm going to fall,” she tells Ibrahim. “Can I hold on to you?”

Ibrahim balks. As a devout Muslim, he's not permitted to touch her. He allows her to hang on to his belt.

At the elevator bank, one of the policemen points and says gruffly,
“Get in
.” They ride up to intensive care in hostile silence. When the elevator opens, my mother steps into the bright light of the ICU. A SWAT officer jumps to attention and levels his rifle at her chest.

She gasps. Ibrahim gasps. One of the policemen rolls his eyes and waves the SWAT officer off. He lowers his gun.

My mother rushes to my father's bed. Ibrahim drifts in slowly behind her to give her space.

Baba is unconscious, his body badly swollen and stripped to the waist. He's attached to a half-dozen machines by wires and tubes, and he's got a long, stitched-up wound on his neck from where the postal police officer shot him. It looks like there's a giant caterpillar on his neck. Nurses work hurriedly at my father's bedside. They are not happy about the interruption.

My mother reaches out to touch Baba's shoulder. His body is hard and his skin so cold that she recoils. “He's already dead?” she asks, her voice trembling. “Ya Allah, he's already dead!”

“No, he's not
dead
,” one of the nurses says, not bothering to hide her annoyance.
The family of an assassin
. “And keep your hands off him. You can't touch him.”

“He's my husband. Why can't I touch him?”

“Because we have rules.”

My mother is too upset to understand, but later she'll decide that the nurses were afraid she would tear out the tubes and wires and let my father die. She puts her hands at her sides now. She leans down to whisper in his ear. She tells him that it's okay, that she is there beside him, that she loves him, that—if he's just been holding on for her—it's okay, she is there, she loves him, he can let go. When the nurses are not looking, she kisses his cheek.

Later, in a small conference room off the ICU, a doctor tells my mother that my father is going to live. The doctor is the first kind person she has encountered all night and—comforted by his empathy, uncomplicated and humane—she cries for the first time. He waits for her to gather herself before he says anything more. The doctor says Baba lost most of the blood in his body, and was given a transfusion. He still has a bullet somewhere in his neck but, because his carotid artery was nearly severed, they didn't want to risk probing around for it. The fact that the bullet never exited my father's body is what saved his life.

The doctor sits with my mother while she takes all this in, or tries to. Then the policemen return. They usher my mother and Ibrahim to the elevator and press the down button. When the elevator arrives and the doors open, one of them points and says again,
“Get in.”

Outside, it is dawn. On any other day, the sky would seem beautiful. But Rabbi Kahane's death has just been confirmed—the bullet did exit
his
body, so he died of
the same wound that nearly killed my father—and the parking lot is still filled with police cars and satellite trucks and everything is ugly and neither my mother nor Ibrahim has been able to make their morning prayers. My mother consoles herself with two things. One is that, whatever possessed my father to commit such a monstrous act, he will never hurt anyone again. The other is that his survival is a gift.

On both counts, she is wrong.

There's a reason that murderous hatred has to be taught—and not just taught, but forcibly implanted. It's not a naturally occurring phenomenon. It is a lie. It is a lie told over and over again—often to people who have no resources and who are denied alternative views of the world. It's a lie my father believed, and one he hoped to pass on to me.

•  •  •

What my father did on November 5, 1990, decimated my family. It tipped us into a life of death threats and media harassment, nomadic living and constant poverty, a thousand “fresh starts” that almost always led to something worse. His was an infamy of an entirely new kind, and we were collateral damage. My father was the first known Islamic jihadist to take a life on American soil. He worked with the support of a terror cell overseas that would ultimately call itself Al-Qaeda.

And his career as a terrorist was not over yet.

In early 1993, from his prison cell at Attica, my father helped plan the first bombing of the World Trade Center with his old associates from the Jersey City mosque, including Omar Abdel-Rahman, whom the media
dubbed “the Blind Sheikh” and who wore a fez and Wayfarer sunglasses. On February twenty-sixth of that year, a Kuwaiti-born man named Ramzi Yousef and a Jordanian named Eyad Ismoil carried out the plot, driving a yellow Ryder van full of explosives into the parking garage below the WTC. Their horrible hope, and my father's, was that one tower would knock over the other and the death toll would be stratospheric. They had to settle for a blast that tore a hole one hundred feet wide through four levels of concrete, the injury of more than a thousand innocents, and the deaths of six people, one of them a woman seven months pregnant.

Between my mother's attempts to protect her children from the awful knowledge of their father's actions and my own little-kid desperation not to know, it would be many years before I internalized the full horror of the assassination and the bombing. It would take me just as long to admit how furious I was with my father for what he had done to my own family. At the time it was too much to take in. I carried fear, anger, and self-loathing around in my gut, but couldn't even begin to process them. I turned ten after the first World Trade Center bombing. Emotionally, I was already like a computer powering down. By the time I was twelve, I'd been bullied so much at school that I thought about suicide. It wasn't until my mid-twenties that I met a woman named Sharon who made me feel like I was worth something—and that my story was, too. It's the story of a boy trained to hate, and a man who chose a different path.

•  •  •

I've spent my life trying to understand what drew my father to terrorism, and struggled with the knowledge that I have his blood in my veins. By telling my story, my intention is to do something hopeful and instructive: to offer a portrait of a young man who was raised in the fires of fanaticism and embraced nonviolence instead. I can't make any grand claims for myself, but all our lives have themes, and the theme of mine so far is this: Everyone has a choice. Even if you're trained to hate, you can choose tolerance. You can choose empathy.

The fact that my father went to prison for an unfathomable crime when I was seven just about ruined my life. But it also made my life possible. He could not fill me with hate from jail. And, more than that, he could not stop me from coming in contact with the sorts of people he demonized and discovering that they were human beings—people I could care about and who could care about me. Bigotry cannot survive experience. My body rejected it.

My mother's faith in Islam never wavered during our trials as a family, but she, like the vast majority of Muslims, is anything but a zealot. When I was eighteen and had finally seen a sliver of the world, I told my mom I could no longer judge people based on
what
they were—Muslim, Jewish, Christian, gay, straight—and that starting right then and there I was only going to
judge them based on
who
they were. She listened, she nodded, and she had the wisdom to speak the six most empowering words I have ever heard: “I'm so tired of hating people.”

She had good reason to be tired. Our journey had been harder on her than anyone else. For a time, she took to wearing not only the
hijab
that hid her hair, but also the veil called the
niqab
that cloaked everything but her eyes: She was a devout Muslim
and
she was afraid she'd be recognized.

Recently, I asked my mother if she knew what was in store for our family when she walked out of Bellevue with Ammu Ibrahim on the morning of November 6, 1990. “No,” she told me, without hesitation. “I went from being a mother with a normal life to insanity, to public life, avoiding the media, dealing with the government, dealing with the FBI, dealing with the police, dealing with lawyers, dealing with Muslim activists. It was like a line was crossed. I stepped over it and went from one life to another. I had no idea how difficult it would be.”

My father is now in the United States penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, having been sentenced to life plus fifteen years with no chance of parole for, among other things, seditious conspiracy, murder in aid of racketeering, attempted murder of a postal officer, use of a firearm in the commission of a murder, use of a firearm during an attempted murder, and possession of a firearm. To be honest, I still feel
something
for him, something that I haven't been able to eradicate—some
strand of pity and guilt, I guess, though it's thin as spider's silk. It's hard to think of the man I once called Baba living in a cell, knowing that we have all changed our names out of terror and shame.

I have not visited my father in twenty years. This is the story of why.

Years before she meets my father, my mother falls in love with an atheist.

She has been raised by my grandmother, a devoted Christian and an even more devoted smoker, who sends her to Catholic school and supports her family by working for Bell Atlantic for decades. My mother has never known her father because he abandoned his family when she was a kid.

My mother's a serious Catholic, but there's so much that she loves and admires about the atheist that she marries him anyway. The union lasts long enough to yield a child, my sister. Eventually, though, she realizes that she can't raise a child with a man who mocks religion.

The marriage collapses. Then, unexpectedly, her faith in Catholicism does, too. She's gone to a priest for advice about some passing matter—she's known him since grade school—and the discussion has drifted to theology. My mother believes in the Holy Trinity, but admits to the priest that she's never actually
understood
it. The priest begins to explain. However, the more questions my mother asks—the hungrier she gets for clarity—the more knotted and unsatisfying his answers become. The priest
gets flustered, then angry. My mother hadn't meant to be combative. She tries to defuse the situation. It's too late. “If you have to ask all these questions,” the priest scolds her, “then you have no faith at all!”

My mother is dumbstruck. “I felt as if he'd stabbed me in the heart,” she'll tell me decades later. Her faith in God is not shaken, but she knows, even as she leaves the rectory, that she is no longer a Catholic. My mother is still in her twenties—divorced now, and studying to be a teacher. She takes her two-year-old daughter and ventures off in search of a new religion to pour her faith into, as well as a new husband.

Early on in her quest, my mother finds a book about Islam on the shelf of a Pittsburgh library. She visits a local mosque, or
masjid,
to ask questions, and meets Muslim college students from Afghanistan and Egypt, from Libya and Saudi Arabia—from everywhere. She had no idea how warm and family-centric the community was. The men, in particular, are nothing like the standoffish, coldly masculine Muslim stereotype. They wave happily to my sister as she toddles around.

In 1982, toward the end of May, my mother sits in a study room upstairs at the mosque. She is about to convert to Islam and has been practicing the Shahada:
There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his messenger
. The creed must be spoken in earnest. It must be cleansed of all doubt and radiate only love and submissiveness. In the back of my mother's mind, like static on a radio station, she hears the disapproving voice of her own
mother, who's appalled that she has been lured into Islam and has told her that she'll never be welcome in her house wearing some goddamn scarf around her head. She has literally used the words “What will the neighbors think?”

My mother pushes the negativity away. Her faith in Islam, her
need
for it, is already deep and strong. She repeats the Shahada under her breath, over and over, until it reflects what she feels in her heart:
There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his messenger. There is no god but God
 . . .

She is interrupted by Hani, a new friend from the
masjid
. Hani has been helping my mother on her journey to Islam. He tells her that there's a men's prayer circle in the mosque at the moment and they would be honored if my mother would recite the Shahada in front of them—and become a Muslim in their presence.

My mother's nerves are already in a knot, and her cheeks bloom red at the thought.

Hani rushes to explain: “It won't be scary, or I wouldn't ask. But they love to watch people convert.” He does not add that watching
her
convert might be of particular interest.

“Sarah said she'd sit next to you,” Hani says. “If it makes you more comfortable?”

My mother consents against her better judgment. Hani tells her she'll be a huge hit, and she responds by testing out one of her new Arabic phrases: “Inshallah.”
God willing
. Hani loves it. He beams as he closes the door.