11 November 2015 CODE OF HONOR by Alan Gratz, Scholastic Press, August 2015, 288p., ISBN: 978-0-545-69519-0

“I’s taught and brought up there

The laws to abide

And that the land that I live in

Has God on its side”

-- Bob Dylan (1963)

CHUCK TODD: So do you believe that Islam is consistent with the Constitution?

DR. BEN CARSON: No, I don’t, I do not.

CHUCK TODD: So you---

DR. BEN CARSON: I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.

-- from the transcript of “Meet the Press” September 20, 2015

The First Crusade began in 1096 AD. You’d think that in 2015--nine hundred and nineteen years later--adherents of the Christian and Islamic religions might have learned to better coexist.

“I pretended it didn’t bother me, that I didn’t care what some idiot like Jeremy thought. But the truth was, it hurt like a sucker punch to the stomach. I’d heard it all before, of course. Towel head, camel jockey, sand monkey, rag head, and a couple worse ones I won’t repeat. My dad’s white, but my mom’s Iranian. Me? I couldn’t look more Middle Eastern, even though I was born right here in Phoenix. I’ve got thick black curly hair, heavy black eyebrows, a strong nose, olive skin.”

High school senior Kamran Smith is a solid student and a star running back. He dates the hottest girl in school, and has a good chance of following in the footsteps of his older brother Darius, a West Point graduate who has been on active duty as a Special Ops Army Ranger in Afghanistan.

But the bottom drops out of Kamran’s world when Darius is seen on TV broadcasts, first in the background of an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Turkey, and then directly on camera, threatening future attacks against the United States.

Has Darius become a terrorist? Or has he been captured and coerced to act in this manner?

Holed up at home with his parents, hounded by reporters and angry neighbors, Kamran obsessively watches and re-watches the videos of his brother. Then,

Kamran hears it:

“‘Like Rostam slaying the dragon, we will cut off America’s head, the poison flowing from it like a river,’ Darius said. ‘Like Rostam in the cave of the Sith Lord, we shall emerge triumphant.’”

Kamran realizes that his brother is referring to stories that he and Darius had made up a decade earlier in their imaginative play acting, a mashup of the Persian mythology their mother had taught them and their Star Wars obsession. Nobody else in the world but Kamran could possibly understand the significance of this reference. Darius is surely sending Kamran a message.

At first, nobody wants to hear about Kamran’s theory, even after Kamran is grabbed from his home, taken into federal custody, and interrogated for a week. But then he’s taken aside by Mickey Hagan, a CIA analyst who’s been silently observing the interrogation. Hagan believes that Kamran is onto something.

Is Darius really sending messages to his little brother? Can Kamran and Mr. Hagan join up and decipher the hand signals and odd references that Kamran has recognized and has been trying to tell his parents and interrogators about? Can they stop a terrorist attack in America?

A spy thriller that often moves at breakneck speed, CODE OF HONOR is a first-rate page-turner. On another level, it touches on the issues facing American Muslims and Americans who happen to look like Muslims.  Although there are real threats facing the United States by certain Muslims halfway around the world who hate our country, not every Muslim or everyone who looks like a Muslim is a threat. There’s an interesting twist involving Mr. Hagan who, we learn, was born Catholic in Northern Ireland. Another interesting backstory revolves around Jordanian-born counterterrorism expert Aaliyah Sayid, who is part of Mr. Hagan’s team.

Dr. Carson’s statements about Muslims is hate speech reminiscent of an America I’d like to think we’d grown out of. Having recently spent a month in Turkey, interacting with a population that is ninety-eight percent Muslim, I can tell you first-hand that being Muslim doesn’t make someone a terrorist, a terrorist sympathizer, or an American hater any more than being Southern and white makes someone a Klansman or a KKK sympathizer.

Readers of CODE OF HONOR will have their eyes opened by this absorbing tale of a young American hero.

Richie Partington, MLIS

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