Life
The Taher household was not considered devoutly Muslim, although they forbade their children to date, they also exchanged gifts for Christmas and weren't "regulars" at mosque worship services.
Taher was captain of the Lackawanna Steelers soccer team, and dated the cheerleader Nicole Frick, whose Catholic parents approved of him since he seemed "more white" than most Muslim-Americans living in the area.
At his 1996 graduation, he was voted "friendliest" person of the graduating class. He attended community college, while working odd jobs and living with his parents. In 1998, when Nicole informed him she was pregnant, the 18-year old Taher arranged a hasty Islamic wedding in his parents' living room.
Since Catholicism and Islam both allowed the marriage, on the basis that any children born to the union must be raised in their faith, Nicole and Taher argued over whether to raise "Noah" in the Catholic or Muslim faith. Taher subsequently became more religious, and began attending communal prayers every day, and discouraged provocative clothing and television. Nicole ostensibly converted to Islam after the birth of Noah, but still fought with Taher for increasing secularism.
Like his friends, Taher began attending regular get-togethers at the Wilkes Barre apartment of Kamal Derwish, who had also grown up in the area, but had traveled overseas and spoke of fighting with the insurgency in Palestine and encouraged the friends to consider a Muslim's duty to defend the weak and innocent. At one point, he disagreed with Derwish, noting that although jihad may be the correct path in Muslim nations attacked by outsiders, he could not support something like the USS Cole bombing which took place in Yemen, a country that had not been invaded.
Taher, Moseb and Galeb all decided to leave together after Sahim Alwan made it clear he wanted to return home and was unhappy with the tone of the camp. They were driven to Quetta, and rather than wait a day for the next plane, took a bus to Karachi so they could leave Pakistan immediately.
Read more about this topic: Yaseinn Taher
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