ABSTRACT
It was pushing noon. The Dhuhr prayer had just ended at Sherpur mosque, from which a sheet of white-robed men streamed out before shearing off into Kabul’s chaotically clogged and crumbling streets. As we inched around the mosque and through the crowd, two suicide bombings in the last week and daily street protests over an American-made anti-Islam film strummed furiously in my mind like dueling banjos. That these pious men in prayer caps evoked the visage of a uniformed rabble, I told myself, was nothing more than the new-kid-on-the-block jihad jitters.
