When Zak Ebrahim was 7 years old, his father, El Sayyid Nosair, assassinated Meir Kahane, the militant ultra-Orthodox, anti-Arab rabbi who founded the Jewish Defense League. That was in 1990. Then, from prison, Nosair helped plot the 1993 World Trade Center bombing — and was later convicted as one of the conspirators. Ebrahim was shocked to learn what his father was capable of. So was Ebrahim's mother. Ebrahim writes his story in his new memoir, The Terrorist's Son. Nosair's terrorist acts sent the family into a downward spiral. Ebrahim, his mother and his siblings had to move to protect their safety. And they kept moving — and lived on the edge of poverty. For most of his life, Ebrahim lied to people about who his father was. But a few years ago, he decided to go public with his story and offer himself as an example of someone who was raised by a fanatic yet came to embrace nonviolence. "It was ... very important for me to show people that my experience was unique, even among Muslims — that the vast majority of Muslims in the world are never indoctrinated into this level of extremism," Ebrahim tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "And if someone like me could come out of this ideology that so many people fear — could do it without being radicalized — then what does that say about the vast majority of Muslims in the world who are never exposed to it?" Ebrahim says his mother, who remains a devout Muslim, was never a zealot. She was raised in Pittsburgh by a mother who was a devoted Christian. After his mother's faith in the church was shaken, she looked for a new religion, became absorbed in Islam and decided to convert. Ebrahim's father, meanwhile, grew up in Egypt and moved to the U.S. in 1981. Within a week after his mother's conversion, she met Nosair, who was a member of the mosque's men's prayer circle. Ten days later, they married. Ebrahim was born was less than a year later, in March 1983. Ebrahim says he's spent his life trying to understand what drew his father to terrorism, and has struggled with the knowledge he has his father's blood in his veins. "It's very counterintuitive for a child to not love their father," Ebrahim says. "That was actually something I struggled with for a very long time because I tried to hold this image of my father and the happy memories that I had before he became radicalized as that being my father." It wasn't until he was in his 20s, Ebrahim says, that he understood who his father really was — and how his father's actions affected his life.

• published: 24 Sep 2014
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