The Good Terrorist

Copenhagen

DANES ARE KNOWN for many things, but religious zealotry is not one of them. It therefore came as a surprise to newsreaders some two-and-a-half years ago when they learned that there was a Danish citizen among the holy warriors being held as illegal combatants at the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The man was in Afghanistan to attend an al Qaeda training camp when the United States attacked the Taliban in October 2001, and he was caught heavily armed on the Pakistani border, fleeing the American forces.

The man's name is Slimane Hadj Abderrahmane, which may not strike the reader as a typical Danish name. Abderrahmane is the 31-year-old son of a Danish mother and an Algerian father. Over the past weeks, he has again been dominating the headlines here, calling for attacks on the Danish government--"Denmark is the only country that hasn't realized that a country's leaders are legitimate targets of war in a war situation"--and forcing the Danes to reexamine their traditional notions of tolerance and open-mindedness.

Abderrahmane's is a story of integration gone spectacularly wrong. Born in 1973, he spent his first seven years in Denmark before the family moved to Algeria. He returned to Denmark and in 1997 enrolled at a Danish university, studying mathematics. But his commitment to his studies was half-hearted, and he was living the life of an aimless hedonist existing on the fringes of the techno- milieu, when he got caught up in the Islamist cause in a Danish mosque.

The television footage from Grozny in Chechnya, which was being leveled by Russian forces, was the turning point. The mosque was preaching jihad against the Russian infidels. Abderrahmane dumped the techno music in favor of male voices reciting verses from the Koran, and began adhering to the strict rituals of the true believer.