Hotel California My first thought: I was going crazy. Twenty-four hours of silence (vacuum, remember); was I hallucinating noises now? I heard it again. It was a fine bell, reminiscent of ancient stone churches and the towering cathedrals I'd seen in documentaries. And accompanying the bell, I saw a light. Now, there were two things here that made ridiculously small amounts of sense. First, the whole in-a-vacuum why's-there-a-bell thing. Second, I was floating in the dark remnants of my broken ship, and any conceivable light sources were not within view; starlight is a distinctly different color and significantly less bright. These signals were the heralds of my saviors. The first words they said to me meant nothing. I wasn't listening; I didn't care; I was going to live; I was going to keep breathing. Next to those, nothing else mattered. The recycled air tasted sweet in my mouth, and all thoughts that crossed my mind were cheap metaphors about life-giving substances and how breathing was like sex, only better. (I reserved the right to revise this opinion later.) When I was done mentally exclaiming over my impossible rescue, I looked around. The ship, it was odd and old, either so outdated or so heavily modified that I couldn't tell what make it was, and somehow, the crew standing around me fit the same description, a singularly atypical amalgamation of folk. And me, I guess I was one more piece in their puzzle. I was one more scrap to weld onto the rest, one more stranded survivor who was found. I was now one of them.

Question: "Who is the "Them" the writer refers to being one of?"

Response: "Another found stranded survivor"

A: yes

He repeatedly calls on his followers to embrace martyrdom since "The walls of oppression and humiliation cannot be demolished except in a rain of bullets." For those yearning for a lost sense of order in an older, more tranquil world, he offers his "Caliphate" as an imagined alternative to today's uncertainty. For others, he offers simplistic conspiracies to explain their world. Bin Laden also relies heavily on the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb. A member of the Muslim Brotherhood executed in 1966 on charges of attempting to overthrow the government, Qutb mixed Islamic scholarship with a very superficial acquaintance with Western history and thought. Sent by the Egyptian government to study in the United States in the late 1940s, Qutb returned with an enormous loathing of Western society and history. He dismissed Western achievements as entirely material, arguing that Western society possesses "nothing that will satisfy its own conscience and justify its existence." Three basic themes emerge from Qutb's writings. First, he claimed that the world was beset with barbarism, licentiousness, and unbelief (a condition he called jahiliyya, the religious term for the period of ignorance prior to the revelations given to the Prophet Mohammed). Qutb argued that humans can choose only between Islam and jahiliyya. Second, he warned that more people, including Muslims, were attracted to jahiliyya and its material comforts than to his view of Islam; jahiliyya could therefore triumph over Islam. Third, no middle ground exists in what Qutb conceived as a struggle between God and Satan. All Muslims-as he defined them-therefore must take up arms in this fight. Any Muslim who rejects his ideas is just one more nonbeliever worthy of destruction. Bin Laden shares Qutb's stark view, permitting him and his followers to rationalize even unprovoked mass murder as righteous defense of an embattled faith. Many Americans have wondered, "Why do 'they' hate us?" Some also ask, "What can we do to stop these attacks?" Bin Laden and al Qaeda have given answers to both these questions.

Question: "What is the full name of the member of the Muslim Brotherhood who was executed in 1966 on charges of attempting to overthrow the government?"

Response: "Sayyid Qutb"

A: yes

Allan sat down at his desk and pulled the chair in close. Opening a side drawer, he took out a piece of paper and his inkpot. After filling his pen, Allan looked at his paper in the orange glow from the lantern set back in the desk's right-hand corner. His pen cast a forbidding line of shadow slanting across the page, echoing the inky darkness crouching in the edges of the lantern's struggling glow. The only other illumination came from a lurid moonlight filtered through thin branches and clouds, casting its bone-pale glow onto the pine floorboards. Allan unfolded another page, this one crowded with ranks of letters in tight formation from left to right. The lines of letters stepped into their divisions, in the shape of a story's outline: the loose, dry skeleton of a tale lay exposed beneath their feet, awaiting tendons, muscle and blushing skin. Allan reviewed the troops, all prepared to disembark, their task to form the tale of a young man returning home from Life Abroad to find his childhood friend a bride to-be, thus upsetting the apple cart of his life's plan, clarified of course by his very time away from her he loved best. Although the concept was a simple one, Allan thought it had potential. Besides, the public liked a good, simple romance. Perhaps this will be more saleable, he thought and began to write. They gazed at each other, lost in the rapture of love based so deeply within their hearts that they had never seen it before. "What about Roger?" she asked, knowing that the answer no longer mattered.

Question: "Name few objects said to be in or on Allan's desk"

Response: "Lantern"

A:
yes