Thus, Rashid becomes in the end a positive influence, whether deliberate or otherwise. Charlie Chehab from the furniture store is revealed to have been in the pay of the CIA, setting Ahmad up in a sting to capture the wider jihadist group manipulating him. The CIA's plan was to have Charlie pull Ahmad out before the fatal hour, and the murder of Charlie is evidence of the jihadists' ruthless evil. Although there is no evidence that Shaikh Rashid is also an agent provocateur, his intervention allows Ahmad to finally step back from suicide and mass murder. On the night before his planned operation in the Lincoln Tunnel, Ahmad reads the fifty-sixth sura—one of the passages Rashid earlier had him recite—which emphasizes God as a creative rather than a destructive force. As David Simpson says, "What saves the Lincoln Tunnel is a moment of literary-critical scepticism of the sort that Ahmad has indeed shown before and which his teacher Shaikh Rashid has himself modelled for Ahmad despite his apparent intention to train him as a suicide bomber.… Ahmad in his final moment is unable to construe the truth of the holy book as unambiguously endorsing blowing up Jack Levy, even as he had previously resolved to blow up several hundred others who were not looking to die." Ahmad's critical reading leads to his "conversion." Doubt is shown to be a wellspring of positive action, whereas blind faith is depicted as leading only to death.

XREF: Connects to themes in John Updike's Terrorist and broader literary treatments of faith, doubt, and radicalization.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 142