Khalil

Khalil is a leader of the Mohammedan Brotherhood whom Oscar Fate meets while reporting on the group in New York. Their conversations move between the Brotherhood’s neighborhood work and Khalil’s conspiratorial accounts of race, power, and political violence. He speaks with certainty, but his assertions are repeatedly tested by Fate’s questions; the encounter ends not with a published profile, but with Fate’s editor telling him to abandon the story.

Identity and Introduction

Fate first meets Khalil after keeping an appointment arranged by the Brotherhood. Three members and a black van are waiting; they take Fate to a basement near Baychester, where a heavyset man with a shaved head introduces himself as Khalil. The others withhold their names. Khalil becomes the principal speaker, explaining the group’s ideas and responding to Fate’s questions.

Khalil describes the Holy War not simply as a political program but as speech for those who have been denied speech: it is, in his formulation, the language of the mute and of people who never learned how to speak. The claim gives the group’s rhetoric a register of grievance and representation. It also establishes a tension that runs through the interview: Khalil presents himself as giving voice to the silenced, while making sweeping claims that Fate challenges rather than accepts.

Beliefs and the Interview

Asked why the Brotherhood marches against Israel, Khalil says that Jews are keeping the group down. When Fate counters that Jews are not members of the Ku Klux Klan, Khalil expands the conspiracy rather than retreating from it, claiming that the Klan is everywhere, including Tel Aviv, London, and Washington, and that many of its leaders are Jewish. He names entertainment figures when Fate presses him for examples, then asserts that Woody Allen belongs to the Klan because, according to Khalil, his films exclude Black men. Fate’s brief acknowledgment that there are not many Black men in the films does not amount to agreement with Khalil’s conclusion; the exchange instead shows how Khalil turns a question about representation into evidence for an all-encompassing conspiracy.

The conversation returns to the Brotherhood’s march under a portrait of Osama bin Laden. Khalil says bin Laden was the first to understand the nature of the contemporary struggle. He and Fate then discuss bin Laden’s innocence, Pearl Harbor, and the usefulness that Khalil claims some people derived from the attack on the Twin Towers. Khalil speculates that stockbrokers with incriminating documents and arms dealers needed a catastrophe of that kind. Fate puts the implication directly to him, asking whether he believes Mohamed Atta was a CIA or FBI undercover agent.

Khalil responds by disputing the accepted account of Atta’s fate. He wonders whether Atta was aboard one of the planes, then claims that Atta and the other men were killed and their remains concealed. Asked who flew the planes, he proposes Klan members, unnamed patients from Midwestern mental hospitals, or volunteers who had been brainwashed. These are Khalil’s allegations, not facts established by the narrative. His account turns the question of responsibility into a theory of disappearances and hidden substitutes, while Fate’s questioning keeps the distinction between accusation and evidence visible.

Khalil also places the group’s struggle in a historical frame, invoking the Romans and the Christians killed in the Roman circus. He predicts that the lions will choke on the group’s Black flesh. The image shifts his language from conspiracy to defiance, but it does not resolve the gulf between his certainty and the verifiable information available in the interview.

The Brotherhood and Its Members

The next day, Fate meets the group at a Harlem club and is introduced to Ibrahim, who describes the Brotherhood’s charitable work in the neighborhood. The men eat together at a diner beside the club, run by a woman with a boy helping her; an older man in the kitchen sings continually. Khalil joins them that afternoon, and Fate asks where he and Ibrahim first met. They say they met in prison, which Khalil describes as where Black brothers meet.

Khalil and Ibrahim speak critically of other Muslim groups in Harlem, but the account also notes their effort to be fair and to maintain dialogue. They expect that, sooner or later, good Muslims will find their way to the Brotherhood. This conversation gives Khalil a role beyond that of a polemicist: he belongs to a group that presents itself as engaged in neighborhood charity and intergroup conversation, even as its members distinguish themselves from their rivals and anticipate drawing others into their organization.

Before leaving, Fate tells the two men that they will probably never be forgiven for marching under bin Laden’s portrait. Ibrahim and Khalil laugh. Ibrahim says the march will probably never be forgotten, and Khalil replies that people now know who they are dealing with. The exchange leaves the political spectacle unresolved: what Fate frames as lasting condemnation, Khalil frames as recognition.

Narrative Role and Outcome

Khalil appears through Fate’s reporting rather than through an independent account of his life. The evidence establishes his role in the Brotherhood, his meeting with Ibrahim in prison, his participation in the Harlem gathering, and the positions he articulates to Fate; it does not provide a broader personal history. His forceful assertions are therefore presented within an interview whose questions and reported circumstances allow readers to distinguish his claims from the narrative’s established facts.

That distinction matters when Fate’s editor tells him to forget writing a story about the Brotherhood. The proposed account is stopped at the editorial level, after Fate has heard Khalil’s theories and seen the group’s public presence and neighborhood setting. Khalil’s final remark that the march has made people aware of whom they are dealing with becomes a compact counterpoint to the silencing of Fate’s story: Khalil claims a voice for the group, while the reporting about that voice is not allowed to proceed.