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WHAT MOHAMED ATTA WAS TRYING TO TELL US

By: Ayan Hirsi Ali
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In April 1996, more than five years before he steered American
Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower, Mohamed Atta sat in a small
Hamburg apartment and wrote his last will and testament. He was 27, an
architecture student at the Technical University, the son of a Cairo
lawyer, fluent in German, and living comfortably in one of the most
affluent societies on earth.

Nothing in his circumstances compelled him to dwell on death. Yet he
gave detailed instructions for the handling of his corpse. “I
don’t want any women to go to my grave at all during my funeral or
on any occasion thereafter,” he wrote. He did not want a pregnant
woman, or “a person who is not clean,” to come and say goodbye.
The man who washed his body should wear gloves so as not to touch his
genitals. He was to be wrapped in three white pieces of unadorned
cloth, laid on his right side facing Mecca, and buried “next to good
Muslims.” His money was to be divided “according to the Muslim
religion as almighty God has asked us to do.”

There is no political program and no mention of foreign policy or
economic grievances in the document. There is only a young Muslim man,
in a German apartment, arranging to sacrifice his life to Allah in the
confidence that Allah will reward his martyrdom in the life to come.
The will was witnessed by fellow believers at the al-Quds mosque,
where Atta prayed in Arabic, grew his beard, and where, four years
later, he would meet the men he would die with.

The document is among the most neglected pieces of evidence from Sept.
11 because it contradicts the explanations of the attack that most
Western commentators preferred. Atta was not poor. He was not
radicalized by drone strikes that had not yet happened, nor by
American support for Israel. He was not in any formal or
organizational sense an “Islamist.” Rather, he had an
uncompromising and militant commitment to Islam that he was ready to
die for.

Yet for 25 years Western elites repeatedly insisted that men like Atta
must have been driven by something other than the culture and the
faith that provided him with a lens through which his actions seemed
both sensible and necessary. After 9/11, intellectuals and
policymakers asked “what went wrong?” as though the source of
Atta’s animus toward the West was shrouded in some deep mystery. In
the Western experience, men had not killed other men over religious
questions en masse since the end of the great religious wars of the
17th century. Culture, a term that was once understood to encompass a
great many facets of human identity, experience, and
belonging—religion included—had also been ruled out. Saying that
cultural differences exist and should be respected was a foundation of
the multicultural order; the idea that some cultures might lead people
to murder each other, for reasons that do not appear in the Western
rationalist list of sane causes, struck many Western liberals as too
close to racism to bother arguing the point.

Since then, each time the West collided with Islam, much of the
Western intellectual class reached for explanations that made sense
within its own secular humanist categories: grievance, humiliation,
underdevelopment, alienation, foreign policy frustration, or the
failure of Western states to properly integrate men like Atta, who
were, or must be, inherently no different than immigrants of similar
age, class, and educational attainments from Vietnam or Poland, or
anyplace else. Since all conflicts are material in origin, it was
assumed that they could be settled though material means. And given
the obvious superiority of Western values, as measured through the
superior material attainments of the West, conflicts over land, jobs,
dignity, sovereignty, or redistribution should be negotiated with the
generosity appropriate to those who occupy positions of immense
privilege and power, thanks to the inequities of European colonialism.
If Muslim populations suffered from a democracy deficit, elections
would reveal and moderate those demands. In every case, theology and
culture were translated into psychology, economics, development
policy, or diplomacy.

American leaders then added a second layer of denial. President George
W. Bush stood at the Islamic Center of Washington to insist that
“the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam.” Following
Bush’s lead, after later atrocities in Paris, Brussels, Manchester,
and elsewhere, Western leaders repeatedly said that the killers had
“nothing to do with Islam.” At the same time, the notion of
“Abrahamic faiths” was revived or normalized, as though Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam were merely variations within one spiritual
family, separated by temperament more than by theology or
civilizational ambition.

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