The following excerpt is from Book III, the Lebanese slice of the saga, where I am walking to the last standing synagogue in downtown Beirut with my roommate from Mecca, Saudi Arabia (known in the text as the Meccian).
Not that it made a bit of difference to either Daniel of the Jalama campground or the Meccian, but Jews are “people of the book” in the Koran, and are deemed a protected people. Still, it made the Meccian very uncomfortable looking at a clunky old synagogue, that nearly every other eye that passed along the same street carelessly overlooked. There was something about the taboo of it all, something in the disconnect from everything he’d ever heard—be it from strict salafist Muslims in Saudi Arabia to something he saw on Hezbollah TV—about Jews and Israel. That moment, in looking at the ruined old synagogue was his first experience, though ever so slight, with Judaism. It’s not like he went on 4th grade field trips to Holocaust museums as a kid growing up in Saudi Arabia.
Also, here is a little thing NOW Lebanon did on the site.
