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New by Abraham Rothberg:
The Holy Warriors
$13.95 Printed: 331 pages, 6.0 x 9.0 in.,
Perfect-bound
$2.79 Download: PDF (1494 kb)
ISBN: 1-4116-3038-6
A novel of terrorism and international intrigue that opens:
Hani Hashem walked unhurriedly into
the Seminary, knowing he’d been on enough campuses in England and in Cairo
so his gait, his abstracted look, his battered leather briefcase that
appeared laden with books, would make him unremarkable. The Seminary was
built like a fortress, a huge, red-brick Georgian square with a single
tower rising high above it. It looked like a mosque, and for one crazy
instant, Hani thought he heard the muezzin calling him to prayer. The
entranceway was an arch, shaped like those Hani knew his ancestors had
left in Cordoba and Granada more than five hundred years ago before the
Christians had finally swept them out of Spain back into Africa.
At the same time as they had driven
out the Jews, those same hypocritical, turn-the-other-cheek Christians who
were always accusing Arabs of being anti-Jewish. The people they drove out
of Spain the Christians liked to call Moors or Saracens, as though they
couldn’t bear to recognize that they were Arabs and Muslims. The Jews had
also managed to forget it was those selfsame Moors who under their rule
allowed them to live in Spain for hundreds of years of peace and
prosperity in what Jews themselves called their “golden age”.
“Well, times change, and five
hundred years is a long time ago,” Hani told himself, as he entered the
building and, avoiding the elevators, began the climb to the Seminary
library. He felt the muscles in his thighs and in his calves knot so
tightly, as they had when he was training in the Libyan desert, and he
barely kept himself from stopping to massage them. No one questioned him,
or asked for identification, perhaps because he was bearded, like so many
of them, and had one of their little black skullcaps on. Why that should
make him more nervous, he wasn’t sure, although perhaps it was because he
could so easily be taken for a Jew. He looked like them, the same dark
eyes and swarthy skin, the same prominent beaked nose and black hair. A
Semite after all.
When he entered the library reading room, a few heads were raised from
their books, but did not seem to see him. It was as if, recognizing one of
their own, they looked right through him back into their books. Like
Arabs, the Jews, too, were People of the Book. A few nodded, whether at
what they were reading or at him Hani wasn’t certain, so he nodded
silently, gravely, making believe he too was unseeing, but on tip-toe
alert, seeing everything and everyone around him.
Following a short stocky man into the stacks, he veered away, only to to
encounter a nervous thin woman with thick eye-glasses and had to avoid her
too. Finally, he found a secluded part of the stacks where there was no
sound except, at some distance, the hum of an air-conditioning unit. Hani
stepped up on one of the library ladders and laid his briefcase on the
second shelf from the top. Up there, he could see all around him. No one
was nearby; no one was aware of him. Slowly, he undid the clasps on his
briefcase and carefully slid out the explosive device, the timer, the roll
of tape.
When he finished taping the
bomb behind the volumes on the top shelves, where it was least likely to
be discovered, Hani noticed that those books were copies of the Jews’
Torah, some newly rebound, others worn and tattered as if they had been
fingered by generations. Hani was taken aback, then recalled the Koran’s
curse on the Jews as unworthy of being true Sons of Abraham. Those to whom
the burden of carrying the Torah was entrusted, yet refused to bear it,
are like a donkey with books. Hani laughed aloud, then glanced around to
see if anyone had heard him. Cautiously, he set the timer, checked it
twice against his wristwatch, then closed the clasps on his briefcase and
stepped down.
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