The Imam of the sterile, dust-covered west Bank town of Dura is a knife-thin 38-year-old ascetic known to his followers simply as Sheik Nayef. He is a graduate in Sharia (Islamic law) of the University of Jordan, and he is also a leader of Hamas, the Islamic fundamentalist movement. Dura, like Hebron, its neighbor to the west, is the sort of place that accords honor to Palestinian men who choose to end their lives--and the lives of as many Jews as technically feasible--by detonating nail-packed bombs strapped to their bodies.
Sheik Nayef, whose last name is Rajoub, wears the full beard of the Hamas loyalist, and he carries himself with the aloof serenity associated with that archetype of Islamic fundamentalism, the blind cleric. I met him on Aug. 10, the 11th day of the Israeli Army's closure of the West Bank, 11 days after two men in black suits exploded bombs in the center of the Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem, killing 14 civilians, and four weeks before three bombs tore through a pedestrian mall in the city. An offshoot of Hamas, calling itself the "Martyrs for Freeing Prisoners," took responsibility for both attacks. I asked Sheik Nayef to tell me what Sharia has to say about suicide bombing.
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Prisoners
