He worked at his uncle's falafel stand and read Immanuel Kant, and later Plato and Nietzsche. In the end, he became a radical Islamist, recruiting new talent for a Muslim holy war in the middle of the German city of Hamburg. Djamal was the hunter.
Djamal is sitting on a cushion in the dim light of a basement bar in Hamburg. He sucks on a plastic tube, causing the water to bubble in his hookah, a water pipe made of delicate glass decorated with gold paint. His head is shaved, he has the broad back of someone who lifts weights, and he keeps his beard neatly trimmed. He blows the smoke from the orange-mint tobacco into the air above his head and passes the tube to Bora, a quiet young man sitting next to him.
Bora, 23, grew up on the Reeperbahn, a street in Hamburg's entertainment and red-light district. His parents are from Turkey. His mother sells Tupperware and his father has a store. For a long time, Bora didn't know what to do with himself. He wanted to have fun, but he was always searching for something meaningful. Then he met radical Islamists. Bora was the prey.
The basement bar where they are now sitting was their common territory for about a year. It was a place where hunters could find their prey.
The bar used to be a hangout for radical leftists called "Hinkelstein." First-year students would go there to listen to radical leaders, and it was a gateway of sorts on the path to the left-wing extremist milieu.
By the time Djamal had hit upon this basement bar as a place where he could do his work -- namely separating his prey from German society -- the leftists were long gone. The bar's new clientele were also looking for answers, but in the Koran instead of in the writings of Marx and Lenin. » | Özlem Gezer | Thursday, August 23, 2012
