Read Online The Terrorist’s Son by Zak Ebrahim - Free Book Online

Muslim, but because I can never summon the courage to shout back, “She was born in Pittsburgh, idiot!”
    I’m a teenager now, and, even before the WTC bombing, my self-esteem was shot through with holes. The bullying at school is never going to stop, my stomach hurts all the time , and I bang my head against my bedroom wall at night for the same reasons that girls my age cut themselves. I think about how easy, how peaceful, it would be to be dead, and now there’s this horrible new realization: My father chose terrorism over me .
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    Not long after my father’s call, my mother gets a scary, lung-rattling cough that turns into bronchitis. She’s sick for so long—and so underwater emotionally—that one night I overhear her praying to Allah for guidance. Two weeks later, there seems to be a parting of the clouds: The wife of our sheikh calls and announces that their family has a friend in New York City who’s looking for a wife. Because of everything that’s about to happen, I’ll change the man’s name and call him Ahmed Sufyan.
    Ahmed was born in Egypt, like my father. He works in an electronics store, and he’s an amateur boxer—lean and wiry, his arms ropy with muscles. Like my mother, Ahmed has three children. And he says he is also escaping a dreadful marriage: As he tells it, his ex-wife was a prostitute before he met her, and he’d been forced to divorce her when he found her in her former pimp’s house, a crack pipe in her hand and their youngest child in her arms. For two weeks, Ahmed and my mother getto know each other over the phone. He tells her that he considers my father to be a heroic servant of Allah, and that he’d always hoped to meet my family and help us out however he could. My mother invites him to Memphis, so they can talk face-to-face.
    The night Ahmed arrives, my mother makes baked chicken, rice, and salad for dinner. I am so starved for a father that I’m ready to love him before he even sits down. He appears to be a good Muslim—he instructs us to pray before we eat—and because he’s a boxer I’m already imagining late-night lessons where he teaches me how to fight back at school. I’ve never had much luck with hope before. But we all deserve a happy chapter, my mother more than anyone. My eyes fill with tears when this man who met my mother three hours ago looks around the table at us and says something that should seem ominous: “Don’t worry, children. Your father is here now.”
    By the end of the summer, we’ve moved back to New Jersey and met Ahmed’s kids. After our parents marry, the whole Muslim Brady Bunch shares a motel room in Newark while Ahmed saves enough money to rent an apartment. I’m trying to get along with his family, but it’s difficult. Eventually one of his sons and I have a scuffle over what to watch on TV. Ahmed takes his son’s side. I’ve been punished before—my father would sometimes spank me with a flip-flop—but never by someone who enjoyed it and never with a belt buckle.
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    Ahmed turns out to be a poor excuse for a Muslim. No, he doesn’t drink or eat pork, but he also doesn’t fast or make his prayers or invoke Islam at all, unless there’s someone he wants to impress or control or hate. He is petty, paranoid, and vengeful. He trusts his own children blindly—particularly the son who lies to him repeatedly—but he lays in wait for the rest of us, desperate to catch us doing something wrong.
    We find a place in Elizabeth, New Jersey—a small attic apartment where we live without much in the way of furniture. Ahmed’s behavior becomes more and more bizarre. He pretends he’s going to work but instead stands outside our building for hours, watching us through the windows. He makes me walk miles to school every morning, and secretly