Word: ahmad
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With his 22nd novel, Terrorist (Knopf; 320 pages), Updike answers his own question. Terrorist is the startlingly contemporary story of Ahmad, a high school student in a crumbling New Jersey town whose zealous Islamic faith and disaffection with modern life make him a pawn in the larger, fitfully violent conflict between Muslim and Christian, East and West. They also make him a powerful voice for Updike's abiding, ongoing critique of American civilization, as well as a uniquely tragic individual in his own right...
...When Ahmad seeks to extract from the images in the Qur'an's Arabic -the outstretched columns, fi 'amadin mumaddada, and the vault high above the hearts of those huddled in terror and straining to see into the towering mist of white heat, naru l-lahi l-muqada-some hint of the Mercifuls relenting at some point in time, and calling a halt to Hutama, the imam casts down his eyes, which are an unexpectedly pale gray, as milky and elusive as a kafir womans, and says that these visionary descriptions by the Prophet are figurative. They are truly about...
...Shaikh Rashid is not much older than Ahmad -perhaps ten years, perhaps twenty. He has few wrinkles in the white skin of his face. He is diffident though precise in his movements. In the years by which he is older, the world has weakened him. When the murmuring of the devils gnawing within him tinges the imams voice, Ahmad feels in his own self a desire to rise up and crush him, as God roasted that poor worm at the center of the spiral. The student's faith exceeds the master's; it frightens Shaikh Rashid to be riding...
...movement; the noise is stretched thin over a violence beneath, barely restrained. Sometimes in the lull at the end of the school day, when the triumphant, jeering racket of departure has subsided and only the students doing extracurricular activities remain in the great building, Joryleen Grant comes up to Ahmad at his locker. He does track in the spring; she sings in the girls' glee club. As students go at Central High, they are "good." His religion keeps him from drugs and vice, though it also holds him rather aloof from his classmates and the studies on the curriculum...
...Cheer up, Ahmad," she teases him. "Things cant be so bad." She rolls her half-bare shoulder, lifting it as if to shrug, to show she is being playful...