The son of an Irish-American mother and an Egyptian father who disappeared when he was three, Ahmad turned to Islam at the age of eleven. He is completely devoted to Allah and the words of the Holy Quran. Ahmad feels his faith threatened by the materialistic, hedonistic society he sees around him in a slumping factory town in northern New Jersey. When he finds employment in a store owned by a family of recently immigrated Lebanese, the threads of a plot gather around him that attract the attention of the Department of Homeland Security.