Unit 2: Selection Vocabulary 3

So, although the Saudi government had executed Juhayman, it began to abide by his doctrine.

Leaflets, books, and cassettes calling for jihad in Afghanistan and insisting on ejecting all non-Muslims from the Arabian Peninsula were given out freely. I was one of the youths recruited to distribute them.

I am the seductive fruit, they said, and I would seduce men in all my shapes and forms.

They called me a whore, an outcast, licentious, immoral, rebellious, disobedient, Westernized, a traitor and double agent to boot.

Pages sprang up on Facebook to denounce me, claiming that men would take their igals, cords Arab men wear on their heads, and thrash any woman who dared break the taboo and drive.

She had sold off the turkeys and doled out in secret the old stools, the wash pots, the tin tub, the bed pallets.

There was no explaining to little James and Velma the stuffed bags and chaos and all that was at stake or why they had to put on their shoes and not cry and bring undue attention from anyone who might happen to see them leaving.

He boarded on the colored side of the railing, a final reminder from the place of his birth of the absurdity of the world he was leaving.

The train rumbled past the forest of citrus trees that he had climbed since he was a boy and that he had tried to wrestle some dignity out of and, for a time, had.

He had lived up to his family’s accidental surname.

He had spoken up about what he had seen in the world he was born into, like the starling that sang Mozart’s own music back to him or the starling out of Shakespeare that tormented the king by speaking the name of Mortimer.