“Ishaq began to withdraw from Dutch society,” he said. “He no longer maintained friendships with Dutch boys and started routinely referring to Dutch girls as temptresses and whores. He wore a kufi and galabiya. He listened only to Arabic music and stopped drinking beer. When he was eighteen, he was arrested for assaulting a homosexual man outside a bar in the Leidseplein. The charges were dropped after I went to the injured man and offered to make restitution.”

“Did he go to university?”

Ibrahim nodded. “At nineteen he was accepted into the school of information and computer sciences at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. I hoped that the demands of his studies would temper his Islamic fervor, but once he settled in Rotterdam he became more Islamic in his outlook, not less. He fell in with a group of like-minded young jihadists. He traveled constantly to various marches and meetings. He grew his beard. It was as if my youth were being played out in front of me all over again.” He ate in silence for a moment. “I came to Europe to get away from Islamic politics. I wanted a new life, for myself and for my son. But by the mid-nineties radical Islamist politics had come to the West. And in many ways it was more radical and toxic than the Islam of the Orient. It had been tainted by Saudi money and Saudi imams. It was Wahhabi and Salafist in its outlook. It was toxic and violent.”

“Was he involved in terrorist activities then?”

Ibrahim shook his head. “He was too confused to make a commitment to any one group or idea. He wasn’t sure if he was an Egyptian or a Palestinian. One day he was with the friends of Hamas, the next he was singing the praises of the mujahideen in Afghanistan.”

“So what happened?”

“Osama bin Laden flew airplanes into buildings in New York and Washington,” Ibrahim said. “And everything changed.”

Gabriel was not ready to relinquish the illusion of a waiting American airplane just yet, and so he summoned Sarah with two firm raps on the dining-room door and murmured a few barely intelligible words into her ear about delaying its departure for a few minutes. Then he looked at Ibrahim and said, “You were telling me about 9/11. Please, continue.”

“It was an earthquake, a tear in the fabric of history—not only for the West but for us.”

“Muslims?”