Mohammed is many things. Like most of the men I know, he is an engineer. He is a husband, and a brand new father to a sweet baby boy. He is an immigrant. He is quite the arbiter, a joke and story teller, and -- cheesy though it sounds -- one of the very few people I've ever met about whom the first thing to strike me was a kind of purity and honesty which seems just an easy part of their countenance. How, deserving or not, he just looks trustworthy. Not an easy look to carry off, these days. Mohammed is a good man, just trying to get by as we are all trying to get by, taking care of his family, aiming at being right by Allah subhana wa ta'ala. Sweetly and naively, although that's another story, he arranged my sister's engagement. Generously he lent my late spouse and I his apartment when we were short on simply having a home. He was gravely concerned with seeing to it that a debt he owed my first husband was repaid to me -- all of about twenty pounds worth, as it turned out. He's in the big things when there are big things, but when it's only details he still tries to set them right.

He is also facing arrest.

No one knows exactly why; his own attorney knows not even why. Perhaps he attended the wrong masjid. Talked to the wrong people. In the spirit of the new McCarthyism, maybe he's friends with a man who knew a guy who donated to the charity which once put food into the mouth of one of the world's ten million most wanted. It's hard to put a finger on these things when no official will say.

What we know is just this: his computer housed pictures of both his friends making the rounds of New York tourist traps, and conscripted relatives, in uniform, holding weapons. Apparently this warrants further investigation.

I admit the "war on terrorism" has never really touched home before. It still hasn't, not really -- this is not my husband, not my father, not my son, not myself. But seeing the distant outer ripples of anger and humiliation come into my home from this ... I can not even begin to imagine the feeling at the epicenter. Or the feeling when things such as this take a turn worse, as they are so prone to do.

Wa la hawla wa la quwwata illa billah. Audhu billah, audhu billah, audhu billahi min ash-shaytan ir-rajeem. Not to mention, apparently, from Great Britain.