Free The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism by Deborah Baker Page A

myself to leave the city limits. How much longer would it take to circumnavigate the question of what had happened and why, to take its complete measure? Ten years? Twenty? The meanings already being worked out of the event from Washington were incomprehensible and, I foolishly imagined, beside the point.
    But the details kept coming. Once I began to hear about the men in the planes, I couldn’t stop imagining them waiting their turn at the ticket counter, fingering their box cutters and their awful purpose. The unfolding accounts of the horror on the planes and inside the buildings, the calm expressions of love that poured into phones and message machines, were unbearable to fathom. At a certain point there was no disguising my revulsion.
    The hatred when it came seemed as if it had always been there. I turned it over and over, rattled but also subtly empowered by the clarity of it. Yet, like the dread that preceded the hatred, this also subsided. Only after I stumbled across the Jameelah archive did the questions that haunted me during those days begin to flare up once again. At a certain point I realized that this was something I could do. I would find better answers than the hasty ones we managed to put together in those days. I would find answers more lasting than the easy ones provided for us.
    By then, of course, years had passed. By then the American proxy wars on the Muslim world Maryam Jameelah had written about had become cataclysmic and genuine, no more so than in the aftermath of the attacks. My country now became directly and irretrievably responsible for the deaths of thousands upon thousands of Muslims. That is how, I learned, our new enemies imagined we thought of them. Not by their ethnicities or nationalities or family names, but by their religious beliefs. And this, a war on Muslims, had been our plan all along, they insisted, conveniently refusing to credit those behind the attacks. And yet were they entirely wrong? There was now reason to wonder. Had Maryam grasped something about America that I had missed? Had Mawdudi? As the years wore on, their war dead made up in numbers what they lacked in novelty, immediate impact, and intimate proximity. Yet these escalating figures—20,000, 50,000, 100,000, and more—rendered in simple, disposable newsprint, never seemed to register in quite the same way as the Technicolor ones we had suffered.
    As with the attacks on the city, however, questions touching on the guilt or innocence of the dead were largely beside the point. Either they were all innocent and we were all guilty or we were all innocent and they were all guilty. We shared our enemies’ faith in the power of violent spectacle, in shock and awe. In kidnappings and secret prisons. Did we take after them, or did they take after us? A few voices entertained lingering doubts over our leaders’ rationale for the war; most seemed readily appeased by the bland promises of liberation from tyranny. I imagined my growing sense of shame and alarm equaled that felt by those families who, in the wake of the attacks, had sat quiet and thunderstruck in their homes, hoping against hope that their coreligionists had not been behind them.
    I saw, too, how long-standing legal protections ordinary Americans considered their due might simply disappear. Surveillance could become a free-for-all. Language, too, had become a game; just how far could the leaders we heard from in those days take words from their meanings? The Patriot Act? Homeland Security? Total Information Awareness? In this new season every mention of the word terror had the power to make cowards or dupes or bigots of reasonable people. The word freedom summoned righteous legions at home while elsewhere cynicism and rage proliferated. Maryam’s question echoed in my head: Suppose the American government decided to abandon its Constitution and Bill of Rights and put in their place a police state so as to better defend itself. Would not sovereignty be