Whoever kills himself with an iron weapon, then the iron weapon will remain in his hand, and he will continuously stab himself in his belly with it in the Fire of Hell eternally, forever and ever."

A few days after Sept. 11, that quotation from a sacred Muslim commentary turned up on an English-language Web site called www.fatwa-online.com. There it was brandished by a Muslim scholar who argued that Islam could never, under any circumstances, justify the practice known in the West as ''suicide bombing.'' Suicide bombers, he seemed to be warning, would blow themselves up through eternity. It was, in its way, a comforting thought, but there was no assurance that this learned discussion on the Internet was being followed in Arab centers where the bombers were found and recruited. In the days after Sept. 11, it also became clear that there was no Arab leadership with the inclination or stature to call a jihad against suicide bombings and the latter-day cult of martyrdom that may date from the Iran-Iraq war, in which Iranian teenagers, sent out by the thousands to be human minefield sweepers,

I had taken in a lot in Gaza and Cairo, but it was in Hamburg where I really got a jolt, a feeling in my own bones the temptations our protectors could face if this ''war'' runs on inconclusively -- and how much then could really be put at risk.

The death of a martyr is routinely announced in the Palestinian press not as an obituary but as a wedding. ''The Wedding of the Martyr Ali Khadr Al-Yassini to the Black-Eyed in Eternal Paradise,'' said an invitation carried a few weeks ago in lieu of a death notice in Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, an Arafat-controlled paper. The same nuptial theme emerges in the eve-of-battle instructions presumed to have been written by Mohamed Atta, a supposed leader of the Sept. 11 attacks. ''You should feel complete tranquillity, because the time between you and your marriage in heaven is very short,'' Atta assured his accomplices.

Egypt's security service, uninhibited by constitutional restraints or finickiness, faces no language or cultural barriers when it seeks to penetrate an underground network. For the security services of the West, everything is reversed: they have legal restraints, few if any Arabic speakers and no cultural feel. If I had tried looking at the scene outside the last mosque through the eyes of a German investigator, I'd have been full of suspicion and full of doubt that I could ever know what was going on. If there were operatives at hand, they would not be flashing cellphones with telltale icons on them. They would behave with their own kind of rationality. Moving freely in our midst, they would seek to carry out their missions.

Next it was time to view Ismail's farewell video, the ritualistic last testament that the bombers' recruiters shoot hours before the attack, a key stage in the psychological prepping that deepens the candidate's conviction that he is about to perform a great deed for his family, his people and his faith, that he has reached a point of no return. Ismail was shown in the standard mise-en-scene, with his Kalashnikov and his Koran, declaring that his salvation was at hand. Then, all smiles, he was shown dismounting from a jeep. The next scene, taken from Israeli TV, showed ambulances at the scene of his attack. Usually, this would have been the end, but the video now continued with interviews with the young martyr's parents, next to whom I was now standing. As they voiced their pride, the camera panned the new apartment, lingering on the armchairs and the plastic grapevines.

True martyrs, all agreed, were not people with psychological problems. They were not desperate people. Going ''all the way,'' they proved themselves to be selfless and brave. ''His life is not cheap because he's a Muslim,'' said Hani, another engineering student. ''He offers the most precious thing he has.''

It seemed to be from the laborer that I got the least evasive reply I'd heard to my overused hypothetical about what could be said if the bombers were Muslims. The answer that came back through the two interpreters seemed to place him squarely on the hijackers' side.

''Allah decreed the vengeance against you,'' one thundered. ''Muslims see what happened as divine retribution, carried out under the supervision of Allah by unknown soldiers,'' said another. In odd counterpoint, the big headline on the current issue revealed that the hijackers had been American, a scoop attributed to Iranian intelligence.

He wore a faded green work shirt over jeans with black boots that were once stylish and had a cool, self-contained look that was not without signs, in the laugh lines at the corners of his eyes, that he found it amusing to be sparring with an American journalist through two interpreters (the imam interpreting his Arabic into German, so a colleague could render it to me). Whose words I was actually getting -- the imam's or the younger man's -- was mostly anyone's guess. But, somehow, I didn't think he was Charlie McCarthy.

If Israelis and Westerners want to understand s

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