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morning after the assassination, and we no longer felt safe or welcome there. Knowing we have nowhere to go, Al-Ghazaly, the Islamic school in Jersey City, has offered us all scholarships. It turns out that the slogan on Ammu Ibrahim’s T-shirt— HELP EACH OTHER IN GOODNESS AND PIETY —can be a call to kindness, not just violence.
    My mother gratefully accepts the scholarships and moves us back to Jersey City. All we can afford is a place on a derelict stretch of Reservoir Avenue. My mother asks the landlord to install bars on the windows, but that doesn’t stop drunks from harassing my sister, my brother, and me when we play in the street. We move again, this time to an equally sketchy spot on Saint Paul Avenue. One day, when my mother leaves to pick us up at school, someone breaks in, steals whatever he can carry, and leaves a knife on our computer keyboard. In the midst of all this, we return to school. I’m in the first grade. It’s the middle of the year, the worst possibletime to transfer, even if I weren’t a shy kid and my family wasn’t infamous.
    My first morning at Al-Ghazaly, I warily approach the doors to the classroom. They’re arched and enormous—it’s like I’m walking into the mouth of a whale. The room is abuzz with activity. The minute I step inside, though, all heads turn. Everything stops dead. There’s silence for two seconds. One Mississippi, two Mississippi. And then the kids are leaping to their feet. They’re pushing back their chairs, which screech against the floor, and they’re rushing toward me. It happens so fast that I can’t decipher the energy. Is it hostile? Euphoric? Have I done something unforgivable, or hit a game-winning homerun? The kids are shouting now, one louder than the next. They’re all asking the same question: Did your father kill Rabbi Kahane? It seems like they want me to say yes, and that I’ll disappoint them if I say no. The teacher is trying to get to me. She’s peeling the kids away, telling them to sit down, sit down, sit down. In my awkwardness, all I can think to do—more than two decades later I still wince at the memory—is shrug my shoulders and smile.
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    In those first wintry months of 1991, the media and much of the world believe Baba to be a monster, and my mother hears rumors that the Jewish Defense League has declared a sort of fatwa of its own: “Kill the sons of Nosair.” Yet to many Muslims my father is a hero and amartyr. Kahane, the argument goes, was himself a bigot, a proponent of violence and vengeance, an extremist condemned even by many of his own faith. He referred to Arabs as dogs. He wanted Israel swept clean of them—by force if necessary. So while my father is demonized in many quarters, Muslim families thank us on the street and send donations from all over the world. The donations make it possible for my family to eat—and for me and my siblings to have the only extravagances of our childhoods. One night, my mother presents us with a Sears catalogue and tells us we can have anything we want. I pick every piece of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle merchandise I can find. Then, at Al-Ghazaly, I discover that one of my classmates’ fathers is so elated by Kahane’s murder that he’ll stop me every time he sees me and hand me a hundred-dollar bill. I try to run into him as much as possible. I buy my first Game Boy with his money. The world may be sending me mixed messages, but a Game Boy is a Game Boy.
    An activist-lawyer named Michael Tarif Warren has been representing my father. When the legendary civil rights advocate and unabashed radical William Kunstler unexpectedly offers his services as well, Warren graciously accepts the help. Kunstler has a long, mournful face, glasses perched above his forehead, and wild gray hair. He is lively and warm with us, and he believes in my father’s right to a fair