Have you recently discovered that your teenage son is an aspiring jihadi? That all those hours he was spending holed up in his room scouring the Internet he was not looking at porn sites, as you thought, but communing with other martyrs-in-waiting just like him? Not to worry, help may be only a few suras away: Mohammed Sheikh, director of Toronto’s Masjid el Noor Mosque, has developed a “Specialized De-Radicalization Intervention Program,” based on AA’s 12 steps to recovery, that is designed to turn him around. Present your little terrorist wannabe to the mosque’s counselors, and they will try to show him that his “interpretation of the Islamic faith is inconsistent with the last 1,400 years of Islamic schools of thought . . . and bring [him] back toward the traditional interpretation of the Islamic faith, which completely rejects suicide bombings and extremism in all of its forms.” Whether it works remains to be seen. In the meantime, it’s no less worthy a use of the 12 steps than that of, say, VH1’s “Celebrity Sober House.”
