At dawn on May 14, 2011, more than two dozen federal agents and local police officers converged on a working-class neighborhood near the Miami airport and surrounded a small green-and-white stucco building—Masjid Miami, one of the city’s oldest mosques. Police sealed off a two-block radius, and F.B.I. agents, some armed with AR-15 rifles, assembled outside the door.
Inside, eight men were kneeling for the first prayer of the day. When agents called for them to open up, one of the worshippers, a former police officer, went out and asked them to wait until the prayer was finished. The agents complied, and then they arrested the mosque’s imam, Hafiz Khan, an émigré from a mountainous corner of Pakistan near the Afghan border. Khan was in his late seventies, an albino with thick glasses and a long colorless rush of beard. He had moved to America, with members of his family, in 1994, at the encouragement of a younger brother in Alabama.
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