From the NYT review of Traitor:
Samir, the son of an American mother and a Sudanese father, is an observant Muslim and a veteran of the Army Special Forces, a highly trained warrior whose allegiances are, at first and for a gratifyingly long time afterward, decidedly ambiguous.Emphasis ours. Is Tony Scott really that stoned? If it were us, and we were presented with a charismatic dark-skinned lead who was "enigmatic and quiet," whose allegiances were in doubt, who had to deal with a Muslim threat but was himself a kind of Muslim threat, who had an American mother and aHe is, in other words, an elegantly conceived and suavely played construct, a theoretical being born out of a very real political conflict. Samir, enigmatic and quiet though he is, has less in common with Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne than he does with some of the cold-war specters dreamed up by John le Carré in his prime. Samir’s doubleness is built into his biography, and whatever choice he makes is likely to constitute some form of betrayal.