The Jihad Next Door (3 of 3 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
The Jihad Next Door by Dina Temple-Raston. Copyright 2007 by Dina Temple-Raston.
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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PROLOGUE: MUKHTAR'S BIG WEDDING (CONT'D)

The truth was that throughout their teenage years the younger al-Bakris were more than a little wild: more of a product of Lackawanna than their native Yemen. Most of the time, their dueling identities hardly bothered them. They played on the Lackawanna High School soccer team (goalie and forward) and drove around the neighborhoods in the rickety cars that teenagers favor. They wore the baggy training pants and hoodie sweatshirts that had become the inner-city uniform among young toughs. They played concussive hip-hop music at earsplitting levels. They ran with a crowd that paddled through life largely unnoticed. They got by doing itinerant day labor, dabbling in petty theft, trying their hand at drug dealing, laundering money. They gambled with friends across the border in Niagara Falls and smuggled cigarettes from Canada.
In the early days, the trouble they got into was of the low-level variety where young men in depressed towns often find themselves: there was pot smoking, carousing, and clubbing. Though they grew into more serious offenses as the boys got older, in the beginning none of their scofflaw antics were serious enough to merit the attention of the authorities.

It was the parents of the First Ward, those who kept their children on short leashes, who worried about the people who surrounded the boys. The al-Bakri brothers and their friends formed the kind of group you hoped your own son wouldn't fall into--not because they were primed to do anything particularly bad or evil, but because the al-Bakri boys seemed to be testing limits more-so than normal, and young men who do that are bound, sooner or later, to miscalculate and cross the threshold of good sense.

The al-Bakri parents, for their part, chose to accentuate the positive when it came to their children. They turned a blind eye to the late nights and suspicious acquaintances. They focused instead on the fact that their sons still seemed to find time to attend mosque. It wasn't so much that they were devout--after all, they partied as much as other teenagers--but it was clear that they found something intriguing about being Muslim. The family's trips back to Yemen every couple of years only fed that inclination. While the residents of Lackawanna's First Ward did not have much money to spare, they always managed to scrape together what they needed for the occasional trips back to Yemen.

Those family vacations to the old country transported the al-Bakri boys and their Yemeni neighbors in Lackawanna, quite literally, from one world to another. When they strode into their villages, deep in the Yemeni interior, they were treated as conquering heroes. Lives that were rather bleak and aimless by American standards took on mythic proportions in Yemen. Relatives there had next to nothing by comparison. They lived in mud huts. They had barely enough to eat. Their clothes were ragged. The boys from Lackawanna seemed to have it all: money, opportunity, freedom. The trips had a soothing effect on Lackawanna's young Yemeni men by reconnecting them with a place they hardly knew and, when they returned, helping them feel oddly grateful for the lives they led in western New York.

When the al-Bakri father decided his two sons would marry the teenage daughters of a friend in Bahrain, the preparations were begun more than six months in advance. Mukhtar flew to the Middle East in May 2002 to plan a September ceremony. Those months in the Middle East were fun for him. He had no work to do, just a succession of social engagements to attend and daily prayers to make at a local mosque. In July, he went to visit his sister in Saudi Arabia. The two took a pilgrimage to Mecca. It seemed, as the September 9, 2002, wedding neared, that Mukhtar had finally found his place in the world.

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