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

meaningless after we lost our very raison d’être? I began to think that something essential in the entire project of my country had come undone.
    I couldn’t help but ask, how much had my trust in America been a cipher for a deeper and more lasting set of beliefs? How much of what I considered right and wrong was predicated on being a citizen of a well-armed country? I was exiled to a state of devastation and doubt. This was my new nationality.
    The discovery of the archive had become the crooked key to understanding how all this had come about. Here there would be an explanation. Who were these nineteen men? Who were we? Who was their God? Who was ours? It hadn’t escaped my notice that Maryam’s letters also gave me the chance to peer in the window of the house of the aging leader who first issued the call for global jihad. Did Margaret live to see the attacks? What did she make of them? Did she watch the city she had once known so well fall to pieces? Had she changed her mind about the evils of the West or did she remain resolute? Would she defend the indefensible? What could she tell me?
    “There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity,” Susan Sontag once wrote. “The truths we respect are those born of affliction.” It wasn’t that I hadn’t questioned Maryam’s reason. Rather, I looked to her for the outsider’s crucial insight, a blind seer’s clarifying truth. I found in her story a secret history that would challenge those we had been telling ourselves. The wars we were selling.
    I couldn’t shake the sense, too, that the new wars were being waged by the same flinty-eyed men whose aggressive intentions, a scant generation before, were focused elsewhere. “America is allegedly determined to bestow upon Viet Nam a truly free democratic society,” Maryam Jameelah wrote in 1969. “But while buckets of crocodile tears are shed by officials in Washington over Viet Nam’s backwardness and miserable living standards, four million are slain.” These same men had watched that war unfold from lowly government desks and decades later thought they could do better. They wanted a different ending and would stop at nothing to get it. Where others were inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, the shock of this fact kept me nailed squarely in place. That war, too, was painted as a war between freedom and tyranny. “They hate our freedom,” the speechwriters now wrote, picking up where the earlier litanies had left off.
    Like the young Margaret, I began to feel maladjusted, to harbor grudges. I kept a blacklist of those who had written in measured, manly tones about the unpleasant necessity, the sober duty, of choosing this war. Not the war against those who had attacked us, but a fatter, easier, and far more profitable target: conveniently Muslim, as if that were a bonus. In those long years I veered toward shrillness, oppressed by people talking about children and real estate. Friends became strangers. And when conversation turned to the war (and only then, it seemed, because it was going so badly), the general tone was either complacent or meekly despairing. Every day I raked the news for a story that would open everyone’s eyes. But even the most outrageous accounts of torture and mendacity were fleeting distractions. Something more final was required. An unnamed thought lodged inside me like a swallowed curse, a thought heretical and traitorous. By then my widowed friend had left for a new neighborhood; her children grew older in different schools. I lost track of her.
    Once in a while I would stop spinning and remember I wasn’t always like this. But still I wanted to know: By what mechanism did America and the world’s Muslims suddenly become each other’s evil caricature? Metaphor? Narrative? Racist propaganda? In moments of clarity, it seemed to me that whichever side of this war one was on had