CHAPTER 1 THE TAKEOVER A decade before 9/11, the worldwide surge in Islamic fundamentalism and its virulent hatred of the West was largely unrecognized in America. We did not notice when some of the most prominent radicals moved to this country and set up operations just across the river from the World Trade Center. Those early militants, ignored in their new chosen homeland, would become the role models and inspiration for some of the World Trade Center and Pentagon hijackers in 2001. Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue is only thirty minutes away by the Number 4 train from the World Trade Center. Before September 11, a nearby waterfront promenade offered postcard views of the twin towers. But these two New York neighborhoods might as well be different countries. The sterile and overbuilt financial center on the tip of Manhattan that was rendered into a giant open-air cemetery covered by tons of twisted debris is quintessentially American. The mile stretch of Brooklyn seems a much closer cousin to downtown Cairo than Wall Street.

It is a neighborhood overcrowded with the city's densest concentration of Arabs. If someone just arrived from Lebanon or Syria, they might feel at home along those gritty and packed streets. Many Muslims, in traditional robe and turban, crowd near the Islamic community centers and bookshops, Middle Eastern restaurants, grocery stores and bakeries, smoke shops, translation services, and hairdressers. Some men gather in small groups at outdoor cafes, sipping minted tea and smoking from bubbling hookahs, large, standing water pipes filled with fruit- and herb-infused tobacco. Women in layered skirts and head-covering scarves, babies in tow, walk several paces behind the men. Quavering Arab music blares from several record stores. On Fridays, the Muslim day of prayer, when the mosques fill, overflow crowds by the hundreds throw down small prayer rugs on the sidewalk and prostrate themselves toward Mecca. The mosques range from lavish Ottoman-style buildings to basements of car service garages.

But the best known house of worship is Masjid al-Farooq, located on several floors of a run-down commercial building. The second-floor sanctuary is bathed in a soft light, tinted green from jade-colored walls and worn purple-and-emerald-colored carpet. Worshipers line up shoulder to shoulder, creating human stripes across the carpet, all facing Mecca and praying. Incense sticks resting in cracks in the plaster walls fill the room with a sweet smell. Racks along the back wall hold a collection of workingmen's shoes: Nike sneakers, paint-spattered construction boots, worn-out wing tips, scuffed thick-soled shoes of civil servants. Among the crowd of emigres are African-Americans, young men with knitted skullcaps or baseball caps turned backward. The imam, the mosque's prayer leader, stands in a simple brown robe behind a plain wooden lectern, reading verses from the Koran. Many of the faithful-men in their twenties from Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, and the West Bank-gather in the hallway after the service.

They trade information about jobs at cab companies and at construction sites, and pass along tips on cheap rooms for rent and religious activities for Arabic-speaking newcomers. Some discuss the attack on the World Trade Center three days ago, but when they see a stranger approach, they revert to Arabic.* This Arab mecca in the heart of New York is not a recent phenomenon. The migration had started in the early 1900s as Arabs fled persecution in the Ottoman Empire. Some set up shop not far from their stop at Ellis Island-on Manhattan's Washington Street and Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue. In the 1930s, and again after World War II, there were waves of new immigrants. Manhattan's high prices drove most newcomers to Brooklyn. "This area is known as an Arab enclave throughout the world," boasts Sam Moustapha, a co-owner of the family-run Oriental.