The Freshman

NYT Magazine: Sometimes walking up College Street, when the bells were ringing in Harkness Tower and the light on the gabled dorms and leafy quads made the whole campus seem part of some Platonic dream, he could almost forget that there were people back home who would be happy to kill him.

His formal introduction to the terrain of the Western mind came in July at the start of the summer term; most of the class of ‘09 would not arrive until the fall term. He was glad for the chance to get his bearings. The direction of Mecca he knew from the compass on his watch. For local attractions he had a map of the campus; he got a cellphone, a Yale e-mail account. His student ID card admitted him to lots of campus dining halls, where at first it seemed he was free to choose anything he liked as long as it was pasta. He took to drinking milk with the pasta, but milk didn’t agree with him any more than pasta did, and he dropped 15 pounds over the summer. It wasn’t until the fall that one of his new friends, Fahad, a Pakistani, tipped him off to the kosher meat at Slifka, the Jewish dining hall.

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Mike Hoover / CBS via The New York Times

Although Rahmatullah had begun to question some aspects of Taliban life, in 2000 Afghanistan’s foreign minister designated him to be the bridge between the Islamic world and the West.