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In 1998 I went to Pakistan to visit Hassan, a friend who, after a decade spent first at Vassar on a scholarship, then in New York and Toronto, had gone back home. Nawaz Sharif had won an election, one of the few elections that had been held in his country during his lifetime. Hassan had gone back in the hope that a secular renaissance might be brewing.

Hassan showed me his Lahore: its architecture that, like Havana's, can make you weep for its evocation of what was and ought to be again; showed me cafés where, until 1958 when the first of Pakistan's military dictatorships began eviscerating the country's civil liberties, intellectuals and journalists debated politics; showed me well-attended public performances of music and poetry. With his family, who lived in a suburb of the city called Defence, the enclave of retired military men like his uncle, I had heart-in-your-mouth conversations about the still largely unacknowledged shame that clung to the perpetrators and the survivors of the bloody partition from India in 1947. At clubs and over tea and sweet brown hash I met bright, passionate people working with NGOs to improve literacy, provide drinking water to rural areas north of the city, and create traction for the latest phase of democracy. I left the city rooting for it. I was a Lahoriphile.

About a year after I left, a guy named Omar Sheikh came back to Lahore too. Sheikh came back from India where he had spent the three prior years in stir for kidnapping four hapless western backpackers in Delhi. Jihadi pals of his had hijacked an Air India plane, flown it to Kandahar, and after three days of intense negotiations, ended up exchanging the lives of all but one of the passengers for him - the one, Ripen Katyal, 25, a newly wed, was beheaded just in case it wasn't clear to authorities that the hijackers meant business.

Two years after he came back to Lahore, in January 2002, Sheikh tricked a reporter from the Wall Street Journal named Daniel Pearl into believing that he could arrange an interview for Pearl with Sheikh Mubarik Ali Gilani, the man reputed to have been the guru behind wacko Richard Reid's botched attempt to down an American Airlines Paris-to-Miami flight with a bomb hidden in his sneakers.

Pearl, then 39 years old, was an accomplished violinist, a journalist respected for his candor and curiosity. At the time he met Sheikh, he and his French Buddhist wife, Marianne, were expecting the birth of their first child. Sheikh had the car that was supposed to have driven Pearl to his rendevous, driven instead to an abandoned property on the outskirts of Karachi. For five days Pearl was kept there and tortured. On the sixth day he was executed. The execution was gruesomely immortalized in a three-minute-and-forty-second-long video. The director intersperses a head shot of Daniel Pearl acknowledging that his grandparents lived in Israel and that both he and his parents were Jewish, with newsreel footage showing Muslim children weeping as Israeli tanks roll into the occupied territories. Then you see a close-up of a butcher's knife slitting Daniel Pearl's throat. Then you see Pearl's head being sawed off. And you see his head held up to the camera. You can download the video off the internet - just enter "Daniel Pearl Video" into a Google search.

As soon as I learned of the murder of Daniel Pearl, I peppered Hassan with emails and phone calls. Hassan was back in New York by then - around the same time Sheikh arrived in Lahore, General Pervez Musharraf had staged a coup and re-established another of the military dictatorships that had infected Pakistan for more than a third of its history.

How was it possible? I wanted to know. Omar Sheikh was born in England into a prosperous merchant family, a guy whose education included the prestigious Forrest School in London - alma mater of filmmaker Peter Greenaway - and then, for two years in Lahore, the equally prestigious Aitchison College - where, coincidentally, Hassan's cousin had been a student at the same time. Sheikh had gone to the London School of Economics - where he excelled! He was a square guy - the polar opposite, say, of Che Guevara, another guy who didn't shrink from murder for the sake of the cause - a guy who played chess, participated actively in secular groups, a sociable guy esteemed, like Pearl, by his friends; a guy with Jewish friends, a guy who extolled Jews! ... extolled Americans ... extolled Americans and Jews!

How could a guy like that turn? How could he turn from our culture, no, not just ours but his culture too, our/his plastic dynamic culture that, albeit awkwardly, invites the world to come and add its impress to it? How could he turn from that to a culture defined by exclusivity so sacred that it demands steeled hatred to guard itself against pollution from the other, from all others, and, like all fundamentalist cultures, is as static as death?

Hassan was curiously nonplussed. He was not horrified by what Sheikh had done. He talked about Sheikh as though he were more of a buffoon than a monster. He said that what interested him most about my questions wasn't so much Sheikh as my fascination with Sheikh. And at one point he said, "David, don't you realize, I could be Omar Sheikh?"

I was baffled, too baffled even to ask him what he meant. Our dialogue petered out unresolved. Bernard Levy's book, published in English this past fall, reawakened it.

Levy is a philosopher and a journalist and a political activist of prodigious reach. Who Killed Daniel Pearl is the twenty-ninth book he has published since he wrote Barbarism with a Human Face twenty-five years ago at the age of twenty-eight. His thesis, an important one, is that Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, ultimately rules the Jihadi roost. It supports groups like the one that secured Omar Sheikh, groups that use the same creepy methods that all sick cults use: We, the pure, the only ones who understand, the Volk, the ummah, the people, we are all together; eating, sleeping, reciting, chanting, memorizing, dedicating ourselves together to the sacred message of redemption, ready to die for it, eager to die for it, dying to die for it, and so dedicated are we now, so prepared, so trained, so pure, and so right, that the only other people we can trust are - the horror, the horror - other people like us.

What Levy could not help me understand was why Omar Sheikh bought it.

Again I wanted Hassan's take. He hadn't read the book. I précised it for him. He didn't like the sound of it. He told me Levy should consider how he could become Jihadi Bernard. A few weeks later when we spoke again, he told me I should consider how I might become Jihadi David. I was as baffled as I had been the year before when he said: "David, don't you realize that I could be Omar Sheikh?"

Was Hassan asking me to think about whether I could ever be so convinced by religious feeling - or feel besieged enough as a Jew - to relate to Omar Sheikh? Was he telling me that he understood how Omar Sheikh felt and that this understanding was what was missing from Levy's book and from our conversations? Was he telling me he himself might have turned?

This year Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, fell a week after I read Levy's book. Rosh Hashanah is also the anniversary of my father's death. The day my father died I went into the synagogue for the first time in twenty-five years and recited Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. For the next year I fulfilled a Jewish son's obligation: I went to the synagogue to recite the prayer every day.

Around the time I was saying Kaddish, religious guys in the north end of the city started sending faxes to synagogues across the country that reprinted anti-semitic articles calling for Israel's annihilation culled from the Palestinian press. The faxes purportedly revealed the Palestinians' "true" intentions and implied that what little official civility existed between the two sides then - and small though it was, it was infinitely larger than what exists today - was a cheat. I loathed those faxes; loathed them for pretending that Palestinians were like that, loathed them for refusing to acknowledge that the views they represented were of no one more than their own frightened counterparts, loathed them for their loathing.

Still, and despite myself, as the year passed, more of my identity came to be made of the dismaying bitterness and anxieties that, sadly, are so much a part of Jewish stuff. For the first time since I'd been a kid I recalled the embarrassment of having to recite Christian prayers in public school in Ottawa. I remembered the feelings of vague uneasiness when friends' parents told me Jews had good vocabularies, or Jews rarely committed violent crimes. I remembered feelings of sadness and bewilderment and outrage when a neighbourhood friend told me his father wouldn't let him share a paper route with me because I was a Jew. I sometimes fantasized going back in time and wrapping my hands around the throat of Frederick Charles Blair, the Director of Immigration during the late 1930s and early 1940s, who personally made sure that virtually no Jews would escape Europe to the country I was born in just a few years later. I could feel my mind involuntarily wrapping it all up in the same package: the benign and the malign, the trivial and the significant.

That year was the closest I came to Jihadi Dave.

Who has not had a moment like that? What person of colour? What gay person? What child of poverty? What Irish person when the jokes turn to drinking? What contemporary German when the Jews talk about the holocaust? What human cannot recall at some point tasting shame's bitterness at the memory of being slighted, rejected, or oppressed simply for what one was? Why don't they all become Jihadis? Why doesn't everybody?

Five years before my father died on a trip to Israel, a religious friend deposited me in the lair of Rabbi Noah Weinberg, the spiritual head of Aish Hatorah, the organization that probably more than any other can claim responsibility for the seismic shift toward orthodoxy that has occurred within Judaism over the past quarter century. My friend's agenda was to introduce a potential convert to the great converter. Weinberg had a soft white beard, kind eyes, and a generous voice, and when he spoke to me about God and becoming one of the group, I started to sweat and look for the door. That's why I could never have become Jihadi Dave. I couldn't surrender myself to the call of the larger cause. I could recite Kaddish for my father as a personal experience. I couldn't do it as part of the group, part of the tribe.

Sheikh was different. In England, Sheikh was a member of clubs: chess, arm wrestling, and others. Friends from Aitchison remember that he liked an audience. The same friends report that during the Serbian atrocities in Bosnia, Omar Sheikh celebrated his identity as a Muslim for the first time. He joined a relief brigade. When the brigade got to Bosnia he disappeared. Bernard Levy speculates that it was during this disappearance that an Al-Qaeda type first approached him. Sign me up: I like being a member of the club.

What about Hassan? How could he have been Omar Sheikh? How come he wasn't?

Back in 1998, after we'd spent a week together in Lahore, he took me to visit an ancient Buddhist monastery in Taxila, an hour's drive north of Islamabad. We were driving back along the toll road that leads from Islamabad to Lahore. The road was empty - it was always empty; nobody except government officials and the miniscule percentage of the population that had money could afford the toll. We were listening to tapes of contemporary sufi music. Hassan started telling me how, when he was a kid, boys just a few years older than he would stride around Karachi, his home town, brandishing guns that Americans had provided to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. They looked cool. He admired them. Then, suddenly the Americans were gone and those same guys were left, jobless, but still armed and his hometown turned into a hell.

Native Sindis - Karachi is in the province of Sind - turned on the Mohajirs, the better educated, urdu-speaking people who had poured into the city from India after partition and who had come to dominate the culture. Sunnis turned on Shiites. During the 1980s, murders and attempted murders rose from 8,000 to 20,000, and kidnappings and abductions leapt from 3,500 to 6,000.

The Americans didn't care, he said. The west didn't care. They didn't care that he and his family and his friends - all the people he had introduced me to - ached for civility, for democracy, for the society that had produced the architecture, the cafés in which the pre-partition debates had taken place, the public performances of art that had so enthralled me. The Americans were partly responsible and they didn't care even to know. The only time anyone cared to know about my friend's culture was when horrors like Omar Sheik's execution of Daniel Pearl occurred.

Hassan had expressed no horror when I broached Daniel Pearl's murder two years earlier because he knew that the crime described by Bernard Levy as "the most barbaric" was merely, and tragically, quotidian in his hometown. Torture and yes, even beheadings, happened regularly and none of it had engendered even a scintilla of curiosity in the west.

So why hadn't he become Omar Sheikh? Why was Bosnia - a hell he told me Susan Sontag had argued the west would have intervened in had the victims not been Muslims - not for him the cauldron that it was for Sheikh? The cauldron that robbed Sheikh of the complexity that is part and parcel of being human and turned him into a simple religious virus like Baruch Goldstein, the west bank doctor who murdered 34 worshippers at a mosque in Hebron; and James Kopp, the fundamentalist Christian who thought lining up abortionists operating in Northern New York and Southern Ontario in the crosshairs of his high-powered rifle was his way of doing god's will?

Hassan explained to me why on that drive back to Lahore from Texala. It had started to rain. We were driving past Rawalpindi, a small scruffy city just south of Islamabad. It was in Rawalpindi that Omar Sheik met Daniel Pearl for the first time, at the hotel Akhbar. Not far from the Akhbar is a tomb housing the remains of a religious prelate who was, if I remember the story, related to the Wahabbis of Saudi Arabia. It was the Wahabbis who financed many of the fundamentalist religious organizations in Pakistan in the '70s. As we drove past, Hassan told me that when he was a young man he had made a pilgrimage to that tomb. He had gone there to piss on it.