The Terrorist’s Son (4 page)

Many years later, FBI agents would reportedly give Masjid Al-Shams a chilling nickname: “the Jersey jihad office.”

•  •  •

By the late eighties, the eyes of Muslims everywhere are on Afghanistan. The Soviet Union and the United States have been using the country as a Cold War game board for almost a decade. In 1979, the communist Afghan government requested Russian troops to help fight the mujahedeen rebels (a resistance comprised of various loosely aligned Afghan opposition groups). In response, an alliance led by the United States and Saudi Arabia began funneling billions of dollars in money and weapons to the rebels themselves. The violence has been such that a third of the Afghan population has fled, mostly to Pakistan.

My father's mosque is just a peeling gray smudge on the third floor of a storefront, its downstairs neighbors
a Chinese takeout restaurant and a jewelry store. Still, Masjid Al-Shams attracts sheikhs and scholars from around the world who exhort Baba and his friends to come to the aid of their rebel brothers. For my father and other struggling, disenfranchised members of the mosque, the sense of purpose is intoxicating. One of the speakers in particular entrances my father: a Sunni firebrand from Palestine named Abdullah Yusuf Azzam.

Azzam's on a fund-raising tour of the States, rallying audiences with a stark battle cry: “Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences, and no dialogues.” He has already mentored a young economics student from Saudi Arabia, Osama bin Laden, and persuaded him to bring his family's connections (and his family's checkbook) to Pakistan to support the fight against the Russians. “We will continue the jihad no matter how long the way,” Azzam promises the American Muslims who flock to his talks, “until the last breath and the last beat of the pulse.” He inspires them with tales from the battlefield that veer into magical realism—stories of mujahedeen whose bodies are impervious to Soviet bullets, who are accompanied in combat by angels on horseback, and who are protected from falling bombs by squadrons of birds.

My father meets Azzam at the mosque and returns home transformed. His whole life the world has acted upon
him
; here, at long last, is
his
chance to act—and make a clear and irrefutable demonstration of his devotion to Allah. He and men from the mosque start
meeting in our apartment, talking loudly, ecstatically, about supporting the jihad in Afghanistan. They set up a shop on the floor below the
masjid
, where they sell religious texts, posters, and cassettes to raise money. It's a dim, windowless space. There are books everywhere. The walls are covered with teachings from the Qur'an, written in giant, swooping glitter. Baba takes my brother and me there all the time, and we help out. We have no real idea what is going on, but there's no mistaking that my father is
alive
again.

My mother approves of the Afghan jihad—to a degree. She is both a devout Muslim and a patriotic American, and while these identities are often at odds, the alliance between the Muslim rebels and the Americans in Afghanistan is a rare instance in which her religious and political leaders agree on something. But my father is hurtling forward too fast. He now has a direct line to Azzam, whom he idolizes. He and the men from the mosque go on camping trips to practice survival skills. They drive out to the Calverton Shooting Range on Long Island for target practice. When the head of the mosque expresses concern over its radicalization, they push him out of his post. It probably goes without saying that my father no longer has any time for my mother and us kids, but there it is. When he tags along for my first day at a new school, my mother is shocked. Not long ago, his family was his abiding concern; now we are competing for his attention with Muslims around the globe.

The breaking point comes when my father tells my
mother that he no longer wants to support the jihad from afar: He wants to go to Afghanistan and take up arms. My mother is terrified. She begs him to reconsider. He will not. And there's more: He insists that my mother move to Egypt with us kids to live with my grandfather while he joins the mujahedeen. Fortunately, my grandfather is appalled by the plan. He believes that my father's place is with his wife and children, and he rejects the proposal. He goes so far as to tell my father that, if indeed we move to Egypt, he will disown us and watch us starve.

My father doesn't have long to mourn the death of his dreams. In 1989, someone (it will never be clear who) attempts to assassinate Azzam by packing his pulpit in Peshawar, Pakistan, with explosives. The bomb does not go off. On November twenty-fourth of that same year, however, Azzam and his two sons are in a Jeep on the way to Friday prayers when an assassin detonates a bomb under the road. All three are killed. It is difficult to convey the effect of the news on my father. Looking back over two decades later, my mother will pinpoint Azzam's murder as the moment she lost her husband forever.

In 1989, the Soviets give up on Afghanistan and withdraw. The United States, with nothing at stake in the region anymore, decamps as well. Afghanistan has become a nation of widows and orphans, its people, economy, and infrastructure ravaged. Jihadists such as my father long to create the first true Muslim state in the world—a country run by Islamic law, known as
sharia. In 1990, one of Osama bin Laden's allies, the blind Egyptian sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, travels to America to rally the faithful for a truly global jihad that not only reclaims Afghanistan but also puts an end, by any means necessary, to what they see as the American-sponsored tyranny of Israel over Palestine. The Blind Sheikh is on the State Department's terrorist watch list, and rightfully so: He's been imprisoned in the Middle East for issuing the fatwa that led to the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Rahman manages to wrangle a tourist visa nonetheless. When the State Department revokes it, he convinces the Immigration and Naturalization Service office in New Jersey to give him a green card. Government agencies, it seems, cannot agree on how to handle an international terrorist who was just our ally against the Russians.

Around this time, we move from Jersey City to Cliffside Park at my mother's insistence. It's a quiet, leafy suburb—it's just gotten its close-up as Tom Hanks's hometown in
Big
—and my mother hopes that distance will break the bond between my father and the radicals at Masjid Al-Shams. In truth, it changes nothing. Every morning he rails at her, quoting passages from the Qur'an and from Muhammad's teachings in the Hadith. Islam says
this
, wife, Islam says
that
. My father has become a stranger to her. Every night after work, he makes the long drive back to our old mosque or to a new one, in Brooklyn, where the Blind Sheikh is also captivating the faithful. My father's obsession with
the plight of Muslims in Palestine deepens, as does his disgust for America's support of Israel. He's not alone in this, of course. My whole life—in mosques, in living rooms, at fund-raisers for Hamas—I've been told that Israel is the enemy of Islam. But the words sound harder now. My mother worries that some sort of disaster is headed our way. She goes on what she'll later call “autopilot,” devoting herself to us kids and just trying to get through the dark tunnel of days.

My father brings me to hear the Blind Sheikh speak many times. I don't understand enough Arabic to grasp more than a few scattered words, but his ferocity frightens me. When my father ushers me up to shake Rahman's hand after the sermon, I just nod shyly. Then they put plastic sheeting down on the floor of the mosque and the men bring
fatteh
—toasted pita and rice covered with lamb soup—out for dinner. For an hour, the voices of parents and children are like birds in the air, and everything seems warm and ordinary again and we eat.

My father grows closer to the Blind Sheikh. Unbeknownst to us, the sheikh is apparently urging him to make a name for himself in the movement. My father considers assassinating the future prime minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, and goes so far as to stake out his hotel. He eventually gives up on the plan, but for a fundamentalist who believes himself to be a living instrument of Allah's righteous fury, potential targets are everywhere. Soon, my father discovers what he believes to be his true calling: he must murder Rabbi Kahane.

•  •  •

Here is one of the last memories I have of my father as a free man: It's a Saturday morning in Jersey City. Late summer. Baba wakes my brother and me up early—we've fallen back asleep after praying before sunrise—and tells us to prepare for an adventure. We dress and follow him drowsily out to the car. We drive and drive and drive: out of our green suburb, across the tense, congested Bronx, and onto Long Island. Two hours go by, which feel like four to my brother and me. Finally, we arrive at a big blue sign:
CALVERTON SHOOTING RANGE.

We pull into a sandy lot, and I see that Ammu Ibrahim is waiting for us, along with another car, full of my father's friends. My uncle is leaning back against his sedan while his boys run around happily, kicking up sand. He's wearing a T-shirt that bears a map of Afghanistan and a slogan:
HELP EACH OTHER IN GOODNESS AND PIETY
. The men all wish one another peace, then one of my father's friends pops open the trunk of his car, which is full of pistols and AK-47s.

The targets—silhouettes of faceless men—stand in front of steep embankments. There's a flashing yellow light on top of each of them, and a ring of fir trees atop the hills beyond. Every so often a rabbit will scurry out, get spooked by the crackle of gunfire, and scurry back in.

Baba and Ammu shoot first, then us kids. We take turns for a while. I had no idea my father had become
such a marksman. As for me, the rifle is heavy in my arms, and I don't have nearly as good aim as my cousins, who tease me every time I miss the target and hit the embankment, the bullet sending up a tiny spray of sand.

A low ceiling of clouds slides over the shooting range, casting everything in shadow. A half-hearted rain starts to fall. We're about to pack it in when, on my final turn, something strange happens: I accidentally shoot out the light on top of the target, and it shatters—explodes, really—and sets the silhouette of the man on fire.

I turn to Baba, my whole body clenched, worrying that I've done something wrong.

Strangely, he grins and nods approvingly.

Next to him, Ammu laughs. He and my father are close. He must know that my father is planning to kill Kahane. “
Ibn abu,”
he says, with a broad smile.

The implication of Ammu's words will trouble me for years, until I realize that my uncle is entirely wrong about me.

“Ibn abu.”

Like father, like son.

We wait forever for the van. We're in this immense parking lot—the biggest parking lot I've ever seen—and the world is gray and cold, and there's nothing to do, nothing to look at, nothing but a silver lunch truck surrounded by fog. My mother gives us kids five dollars, and we wander over to check it out. The truck is selling knishes, among other things. I've never heard of a knish—it sounds like something Dr. Seuss invented—but the spelling is so cool and weird that I buy one. It turns out to be a deep-fried something-or-other filled with potato. When I'm older, I'll discover that knishes are Jewish pastries, and I will remember having slathered one with mustard and devoured it on the way to Rikers Island, where my father was awaiting trial for shooting one of the world's most prominent, and divisive, rabbis in the neck.

When we arrive at Rikers, we join a long, snaking, boisterous line of visitors, most of them women and children. I can see how much it pains my mother to have to bring her children here. She keeps us pressed close. She has told us that Baba has been accused of killing a Jewish rabbi, but is quick to add that only Baba himself can tell us if that's true.

We're funneled through security. The checkpoints seem to be endless. At one of them, a guard puts on a rubber glove and fishes around inside my mother's mouth. At another, we're all searched and patted down—a simple matter for my brother and me but a complicated one for Islamic women and girls wearing
hijab
that they're forbidden from taking off in public. My mother and sister are whisked off to private rooms by female officers. For half an hour, my brother and I sit alone, swinging our legs and doing a bad job of looking brave. Finally, we're all reunited and ushered down a concrete hallway toward the visiting room. Then suddenly, for the first time in months, Baba is right in front of us.

He's wearing an orange jumpsuit. He has a badly bloodshot eye. My father, now thirty-six, seems haggard, exhausted, and not entirely like himself. At the sight of us, though, his eyes get bright with love. We run to him.

After a melee of hugs and kisses—after he's bound the four of us up in his arms like one giant bundle—my father assures us that he is innocent. He wanted to talk to Kahane, to tell him about Islam, to convince him that Muslims were not his enemies. He promises us that he did not have a gun, and that he is not a murderer. Even before he's finished speaking, my mother is sobbing. “I
knew
it,” she says. “In my heart, I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.”

My father talks to my sister, my brother, and me one by
one. He asks us the same two questions he will ask us for years whenever he sees us or writes to us:
Are you making your prayers?
Are you being good to your mother?

“We are still a family, Z,” he tells me. “And I am still your father. No matter where I am. No matter what people may say about me. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Baba.”

“Yet you are not looking at me, Z. Let me see those eyes I gave you, please.”