Simmering political, religious, and racial tensions combine and erupt in three sieges led by the same strange Muslim group around Washington, DC after a years-long lead-up.
I’m new to Washington DC, and still learning my way around the place as a city where people actually work and live divorced from the role that it plays in the United States’s government and politics. Part of that process has been learning more about the city’s history. Like with many things about DC, I had never heard of this story before, but found myself utterly fascinated quickly.
This is a complicated story, made up of many now-forgotten strands which include among them the violent birth and evolution of the Nation of Islam, the growth of Muslim culture in the United States, and the expanding role of the Middle East in international politics. Mufti does an excellent job of juggling these balls, keeping the reader on edge until this strange story reach to its almost cinematic conclusion.
I also appreciated the nuanced portraits of those involved in the story – by getting inside the heads of the key players, we got front row seats to how everything slowly fell apart from the early days of heady idealism. Mufti does a good job of being compassionate without condoning their later actions, and I found myself almost nauseous at some of the things that befell the Hanafis.
I did wish that the author would have lingered a little longer on the denoument. For a story that seems to have been huge at the time, it rather sank without a trace afterward, and I would have been interested in further exploration of how exactly this happened.