WRITTEN IN FRENCH, and Binebine has apparently lived a lot of his life in the west, but he was born and now lives in Marrakesh, so this novel about a group of young men who become suicide bombers probably has better warrant for taking its from-the-inside view than does, say, John Updike's Terrorist.
As in Joshua Cohen's A Heaven of Others, the story is narrated from the other side of the grave, but unlike Cohen, Binebine is not interested in the landscape of the afterlife, and Yachine (the narrator's nickname, from legendary goalie Lev Yashin) mainly tells us the story of how he and his soccer buddies became terrorists. They come from Sidi Moumen, an impoverished suburb of Casablanca (the novel's original title is Les Etoiles [The Stars] de Sidi Moumen), bond over football, drift into glue-sniffing and kif-smoking, fall into the orbit of a seedily charismatic cleric named Abu Zoubeir, clean themselves up, and are recruited to turn themselves into living bombs to wreak havoc in a luxury hotel.
How sociologically accurate all this is I don't know, but it all sounds plausible. Yachine and his friends have nothing much to look forward to. Abu Zoubeir expertly massages their lingering idealism, rage at exclusion, and hunger for meaning until they are ready to make themselves martyrs. From the other side of his martyrdom, Yachine is a bit dismayed at his own decision and what he gave up for his current limbo-like existence (no houris, no gardens, no fountains), but it's all too understandable. Abu Zoubeir is the first non-family-member in their lives to take them seriously. Why would they mistrust him?
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