Volume 53, Number 12 · July 13, 2006
The Good Soldier
By Jonathan Raban
Terrorist
by John Updike
Knopf, 310 pp., $24.95
From everything we know about the lives of recent Islamist terrorists, the cradle of jihad against the West is not the Middle East but the run-down immigrant quarters of large Western cities, like Harburg, across the river from Hamburg, where Mohamed Atta and his colleagues found their vocation as martyrs in a grimy storefront mosque; Beeston in Leeds, England, where Sidique Khan assembled his gang of London bombers; or Lavapiés in Madrid, home to Jamal Zougam, who stands accused of the Madrid train bombings. When the September 11 hijackers came to the United States, they based themselves in Paterson, New Jersey. In the crumbling architecture and economy of the blighted, low-rent, polyglot inner suburb, the conspirators enjoyed both necessary anonymity for their pursuits and a firsthand view of the 'degenerate' state of Western capitalism, on whose destruction they had set their hearts.
Review, 3742 words
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