On May 1, two Times Square street vendors saw smoke wafting from a Nissan Pathfinder SUV parked with its hazard lights on. Police were summoned to the scene and disarmed the crude car bomb before it could cause any injuries. The bomber manqué was Faisal Shahzad, and speculation as to his motives and training is, as I write, still driving the news. 

Shahzad's story turned out to be distressingly familiar: a naturalized U.S. citizen, he returned to his birth country of Pakistan for training in bomb-making after becoming violently radicalized. There are many such stories in the New York Police Department's 2007 report, "Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat." Its pages are filled with example after example of young men like Shahzad who have embraced, and acted on, a murderous jihadi-Salafi ideology, mostly in a progression whose four stages the NYPD calls pre-radicalization, self-identification, indoctrination, and jihadization. It is a novelistic arc, and it is fitting that several contemporary novelists have taken it up. In doing so, they have given us a new kind of antihero, a ripped-from-the-headlines young man, raised in the West, affluent, smart, idealistic, who works out his salvation through other people's fear and trembling.

Access to the item you have requested requires a subscription to Jewish Review of Books. If you are a subscriber, please enter your e-mail address and password below to log in. If you are a print subscriber and have not yet activated your online access, please click here to do so now. If you are not yet a subscriber, you may click here to subscribe, and receive both the print journal by mail and complete online access to our site.

E-mail Address
Password
	Forgot password?   Set-up Account