 Supporting Ahmad at home is his rather negligent mother, Teresa Mulloy, a third-generation Irish American who, while raised as a Catholic, has abandoned her religious beliefs.Because of her religious infidelity and comparative openness toward sexuality and relationships with men, she has become one of the many objects of Ahmad's hatred — although in her case she is accorded a dutiful love as well.On the other hand Ahmad idolizes his absent father, an Egyptian immigrant who abandoned him and his mother when Ahmad was three years old.