Confronting September 11: Portrait of the Accused

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Since September 11th reporters have searched for explanations for the attacks on the United States and the murder of almost 3,000 innocent men, women, and children from over 80 nations. Buddhists, Christians, Jews, and Muslims were among those who died that day. Who were the hijackers? What motivated them?

Fouad Ajami, professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University, wrote an article about Mohammed Atta, the hijacker American officials believe led the attacks on September 11. It appeared in the New York Times Magazine on October 7, 2001. His profile of Atta is titled "Nowhere Man":

I almost know Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian who may have been at the controls of the jet that crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. I can almost make him out. I have known Egypt for nearly three decades, and so much of Atta's life falls neatly in place for me. I can make out the life of the 33-year-old man, one of a vast generation of younger Egyptians making their claims on a crowded land, picking their way through the cultural confusion that has settled upon the country in recent years.

Atta's father, a well-off but strict lawyer, has given foreign reporters fragments of the life. He has done it in an angry way, outraged as much by claims that his son is a hijacker as by the reports that his son may have been drinking vodka and playing video games days before he boarded American Airlines Flight 11. "We keep our doors closed," the elder Atta said, "and that is why my two daughters and my son are academically and morally excellent."

The father was giving voice to the Egyptian bourgoisie's discipline and anxieties, to its desire to keep its world and its norms intact. From the father still: "He was so gentle. I used to tell him, 'Toughen up, boy.' " So much of the world of younger Egyptians is given away in that admonition.

There had come to Egypt great ruptures in the years when the younger Atta came into his own. A drab, austere society had suddenly been plunged into a more competitive, glamorized world in the 1970's and 1980's. The old pieties of Egypt were at war with new temptations. There must have been great yearning and repression in Mohamed Atta's life; it is the torment of Atta's generation. They were placed perilously close to modernity, but they could not partake of it.

The place affected an unaccustomed hipness: big new hotels, the cultural clutter of Europe and America, the steady traffic of foreign tourists throwing in the air intimations of more emancipated ways in less constricted, repressed lands. But the sons and daughters were to be chaste, and the old prohibitions were to be asserted with increasing stridency.

An easy secularism had once been the way of Egypt, and a measure of banter between men and women. Never as tranquil as its legend, but a gentle and soft country all the same, Egypt knew a cultural wholeness and prided itself on a fairly vibrant cultural life. This had given way by the time young Atta, born in 1968, made his way to the university.

On the crowded campuses where Atta and his peers received an education - an education that put off the moment of reckoning with a country that had little if any room for them, little if any hope - there emerged an anxious, belligerent piety. Growing numbers of young women took to conservative Islamic dress - at times the veil, more often the head cover. While the secularists sneered, it became a powerful trend, a fashion in its own right. It was a way of marking a zone of privacy, a declaration of moral limits. Young men picked up the faith as well, growing their beards long and finding their way into Islamist political movements and religious cells. A cultural war erupted in the land of Egypt. A stranger who knew the ways of this land could see the stresses of the place growing more acute by the day.

The sermons of the country - religious and political, the words of those who monitored and dominated its cultural life - insisted on a false harmony, held on to the image of the good, stable society that kept the troubles and the "perversions" of the world at bay. But the outwardly obedient sons and daughters were in the throes of a seething rebellion. In an earlier age, Egyptians had been known as a people who dreaded quitting their native soil. In more recent years, younger Egyptians gave up on the place, came to dream of fulfillment - economic, personal, political - in foreign lands. Mohamed Atta, who left for Germany in 1993, was part of that migration, of that rupturing of things on the banks of the Nile.

Religion came to Atta unexpectedly, in Hamburg, where he had gone for a graduate degree in urban planning. In bilad al kufr (the countries of unbelief), he needed the faith as consolation, and it was there that he sharpened it as a weapon of war. He styled himself emir, commander, of a religious cell. But the liberties, the temptations, still tugged at him; there were those reports from south Florida of drinking and video games. Mohamed Atta carried the contradictions of his worlds, the new liberties and the medieval theology side by side. The man who willingly flew into a tower of glass and steel for the faith broke one of the canons of the faith.

The modern world unsettled Atta. He exalted the traditional, but it could no longer give him a home. He drifted in ''infidel'' lands but could never be fully at ease. He led an itinerant life. The magnetic power of the American imperium had fallen across his country. He arrived here with a presumption and a claim. We had intruded into his world; he would shatter the peace of ours. The glamorized world couldn't be fully had; it might as well be humbled and taken down.

It must have been easy work for the recruiters who gave Atta a sense of mission, a way of doing penance for the liberties he had taken in the West, and the material means to live the plotter's life. A hybrid kind has been forged across that seam between the civilization of Islam and the more emancipated culture of the West. Behold the children, the issue, of this encounter as they flail about and rail against the world in no-man's-land.1

 

CONNECTIONS

• Ajami begins his profile of Mohammed Atta with the words "I almost know Mohamed Atta." What do the words suggest about the way Ajami has constructed his description? What are the advantages and disadvantages of his approach? After reading this article, to what extent do you "almost know" Mohammed Atta?

• Which terms and ideas in this reading are new to you? Where can you find more information on these terms and ideas? One place to look is our resource links.

• According to Ajami, what did religion offer to Atta and his Egyptian peers that was not being met elsewhere?

• As you read about Atta, what do you see as the turning points in his life? What other options were available to him? Why do you think he made the choices he did?

• What is not answered in a reading like this? What else do you need to explain the horror? Is it ever possible to truly understand what motivates individuals to commit evil?

• In describing Mohammed Atta, Ajami talks about Atta's struggle to fit in. What does Ajami point to as evidence of that struggle?

• Ajami writes that "the modern world unsettled Atta." What does Ajami suggest about why that might be so? What thoughts do you have about why some people find the modern world unsettling? What are the ways people respond to changes in their environment?

• Ajami writes, "The old pieties of Egypt were at war with new temptations. There must have been great yearning and repression in Mohamed Atta's life; it is the torment of Atta's generation. They were placed perilously close to modernity, but they could not partake of it." How does one adapt to the tensions of a changing world? Although many people confront these changes, only a handful turn to violence. What else would you need to know to help explain Atta's action?

• What does this article suggest about why people become terrorists? What questions does it raise? Where might you find answers to those questions?

• Ajami writes that Atta sharpened his faith as a "weapon of war." What power would faith offer as a weapon?

• How can individuals and groups help forge and sustain a relationship to insure peace to help religion and the modern world coexist?

• In a New York Times op-ed, Khaled Abou El Fadl wrote that it is demoralizing when criminal elements purport to speak for all Muslims. To help make important distinctions, Ajami and others distinguish between someone of the Islamic faith and an Islamist. An Islamist, as Ajami defines the term, is part of a political movement that aspires to restructure nations so that they adhere to a strict interpretation of sharia - Islamic law. Why is this an important distinction?

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1 Fouad Ajami "Nowhere Man", New York Times Magazine, Oct. 7, 2001

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