Wednesday, October 21

To avoid the chance of Mariam making any connection to the journalist in the warehouse bombing, Nazir introduced her to Dominique, under a fictitious name. They were at the mosque where Mariam worked.

Dominique, wearing a dark hijab, could see Mariam trusted Nazir in the way she listened and accepted what he told her about how he and his visitor came to be connected and committed to jihad.

Slipping into the skin of Mariam’s life—her sorrow for not knowing her mother—her feelings of being “the other” in America—the longing to be part of the culture of her father, which included his passion for justice through jihad. And her feelings for Nazir complicated an already perilous situation.

Dominique had spent years wanting to get into the mindset of the mujahideen, to understand them and change the course of the violence. That way broke open in her conversation with Hashim at ADX prison. And now she was making contact with Mariam’s soul.

From what Nazir had told Dominique of Mariam, she knew this young woman didn’t fall into the usual grievances that gave rise to terrorism in the name of God. She’d been neither alienated, humiliated, nor dispossessed in the ways that drove men and women to sacrifice themselves. Yes, she’d been guided by her father’s grievances, but Dominique could see beneath Mariam’s anger—a force of which Mariam wasn’t even aware was tempering her fervor. And so, Dominique talked with her about the prophets and poets that inspired their cause.

Dominique’s meeting with Hashim in prison gave her much insight.

She’d spent time learning of the work and life of the woman he’d spoken of—the “poetess of the Islamic State.” And when she mentioned Ahlam al-Nasr to Mariam, she lit up, as if encountering a kindred spirit.

The authority of verse had no rival in Arabic culture. That was what Hashim wanted to impress upon Dominique. Desert nomads composed their earliest poems. And while the Qur’an had harsh words for these troubadours, these men and women of words had become companions of Muhammad, praising him in life and elegizing him in death.

Mariam talked of al-Nasr’s book of verse, The Blaze of Truth, which consisted of a hundred and seven poems in Arabic—elegies to mujahideen, laments for prisoners, and victory odes.

Mariam was well informed of this history. She talked of when in the spring of 2011, and protests in Syria broke out against the rule of Bashar al-Assad, how al-Nasr took the side of the demonstrators. The poems she wrote stood as witness to the regime’s violent crackdown, and she was radicalized by what she saw.

Mariam spoke of a verse al-Nasr wrote in reaction to that spring—of shattered brains. Bones cracked. Throats drilled. Scattered limbs. And blood that ran through the streets.