By: Ayan Hirsi Ali
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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