Read The Terrorist’s Son for Free Online

Ammu’s words will trouble me for years, until I realize that my uncle is entirely wrong about me.
    â€œIbn abu.”
    Like father, like son.

5
January 1991
Rikers Island Correctional Facility, New York
    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 byone. 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?
    â€œWe 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?”
    â€œYes, Baba.”
    â€œYet you are not looking at me, Z. Let me see those eyes I gave you, please.”
    â€œYes, Baba.”
    â€œAh, but my eyes are green! Your eyes—they are green, then blue, then purple. You must decide what color your eyes are, Z!”
    â€œI will, Baba.”
    â€œVery good. Now play with your brother and sister because”—here my father turns to my mother, and smiles at her warmly—“I must talk to my queen.”
    I flop onto the floor, and pull a few games from my backpack: Connect Four and Chutes and Ladders. My mother and father sit at the table, holding hands firmly and talking in low tones they think we can’t