In Acts of Faith, Eboo Patel notes that “there is a strong connection between finding a sense of inner coherence and developing a commitment to pluralism. And that has everything to do with who meets you at the crossroads.” This American Muslim from India, distressed by the tensions of his own hybridity and the crises of meaning facing youth not only in Islam but across all modern cultures, founded the Interfaith Youth Core to educate a new generation to reject religious intolerance and work for the common good. The point is often made by others, defensively, that 35% of the population in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf is under the age of 15. Increasingly, the role of the suicide bomber is popping up in literature (Slimane Benaissa’s The Last Night of a Damned Soul, Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, etc). In this paper I would like to contrast Patel’s constructive optimism (against the backdrop of such recent studies as Akbar Ahmed’s Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization, Fawaz Gerges’s Journey of the Jihadist, and Mohammed Hafez’s Suicide Bombers in Iraq) to the apodictic worldviews of those in Islam and in the West who no longer desire reconciliation. Can literature and the arts provide an empathetic pathway to the “crossroads” that Patel is seeking, or has long-term or suddenly emergent violence obliterated such a choice for Islamic youth and their counterparts in the West?