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as they'd been written by the Prophet Muhammad— blessings be upon him. Someday, if it was Allah's plan, his son would also study Qur'anic interpretation, called tafsir; Islamic law, or shar'iah; and hadith, the recorded sayings and deeds of the Prophet.
    May Allah grant him peace, the young man recited to himself. He hoped that his son would grow up to be a man of God, perhaps even an imam in the new world—a Muslim world subject to Islamic law. I'm doing this for him, he assured himself.
    Baptized in the Harlem Baptist Church some twenty-five years earlier as Rondell James, he'd suffered a case of smallpox at the age of ten. It left his complexion scarred and his psyche battered, especially when the other kids nicknamed him "Scratchy."
    His grandparents had tried to fill the void left by a father he'd never known and the death of his mother, but he'd misspent a miserable youth running with gangs, dealing crack, drinking malt liquor until he couldn't stand up or shoot straight, fathering illegitimate children, and serving time upstate for armed robbery. His life had no purpose, no meaning. If he had ever dreamed of something better when he was a boy, the notion had been drummed out of him as a teenager by his so-called community leaders and activists who convinced him he was a victim of racism. It wasn't his fault he had nothing. Society owed him but wasn't going to pay up. It was the white man's world, and he was just taking up space in it. A real nobody.
    But he wasn't going to be a victim anymore. On September 11, 2001, the martyrs had flown the jetliners into the World Trade Center, and he'd seen the power that a few men of faith could wield if they obeyed the will of Allah. Even as the city mourned, a part of him had thrilled that men with brown faces like him had terrified the world's most powerful nation.
    It had also been Allah's will that shortly after the attack, as he happened to be walking down Frederick Douglass Boulevard, he had seen a man standing on a milk crate, preaching to the crowd. Tall and so thin that the skin of his face seemed to have been pulled and stretched over the bones, which made his protruding eyes and thick lips more pronounced, the man drew attention to himself like a red cape attracts a bull. He was dressed all in white, including a small, round white cap on his head. And in his brown hand was a microphone hooked up to a boombox held above the passersby—most of whom tried to ignore him—by another, even larger and much heavier man, also wearing only white.
    As he moved closer, Rondell saw that the two were surrounded by yet more black men similarly dressed—tough-looking men in dark glasses, who stood with their arms crossed and their jaws set. Even the local gangbangers and street criminals gave them a wide berth.
    "Hear me, my brothers and sisters," the man on the milk crate shouted into the microphone. "Christianity is the white man's religion. He's used it to keep our people in shackles from the days when they were brought here in chains from Africa. There is only one faith for the black man whether he is in Africa or America, the one true faith of Islam."
    The man spoke in clipped, three-or four-word bursts, but without pausing in his train of thought. "Only men of the One True Faith would have the courage to strike at the World Trade Center where the white man forged his economic chains every bit as cruel and binding as the iron shackles of slavery. They were men of purpose. Those of you who have been living lives without purpose, find a purpose here with us in serving Allah. Return with us to our mosque and join us in prayers that the Prophet, blessings and peace be upon him, taught us so that we might live as we were intended."
    A few hecklers across the street shouted slurs from a safe distance, but Rondell James stood mesmerized. It was as if the man was speaking to him directly. He'd never embraced Christianity like his mother or grandparents; he couldn't identify with a