Nearly one-twelfth of U.S. history is now post-9/11.
A fifth of a century ago … how has it been that long? … nineteen young men with apparently bad upbringings and a Wahhabi/Salafi Muslim vision of Muhammad in their hearts threw a tantrum that hurt an enormous number of people and permanently altered millions of lives.
No, theirs is not the vision of all Muslims. Restating this fact is important every time we talk about such things. Violence against Muslims merely for being Muslim, or against other people (such as Sikhs) who have nothing whatsoever to do with Islam, is not appropriate. People should be judged for their own actions and beliefs, not lumped in with those of others with which they do not identify. If you would not like others to do that to you, don’t do it to them.
This very important caveat having been made, avoiding honest discussion of what motivated these 19 little boys is just as wrong as painting with broad strokes. Hand-wringing about the evil we see in the world while pretending that it is not in any way linked to specific systems of belief only dulls our ability to deal with and sometimes even prevent further tragedies such as the one we remember today.
9/11 was not motivated by some vague and unspecified “extremism.” All the bad actors shared a system of belief.
This morning, I read that only 9% of self-identified Christians hold to a biblical worldview. This means, of course, that 91% of self-identified Christians do not hold to such. Most people who call themselves Christians probably are not actually Christians, but rather merely have some vague or cultural sense of being a Christian. If you want to know how real Christians act (and to be clear, even real Christians are not free from bad behavior), then you need to watch Christians who are reading their Bibles and trying to follow what Jesus told them to do.
Although I am not an Islamic theologian, I do study Islam, and in the course of my study I have discerned that something similar is true about the 1.8 billion Muslims in the world: For some portion, probably a significant portion and perhaps even a majority, Islam is probably something more of a cultural affirmation than a Quran- and Sunnah-based religion that is actually believed and pursued, or it is something that includes religious piety while also being good neighbors with non-Muslims. Remembering that there is some variation in the way Muslims read and interpret the Quran and other Islamic sources of authority, if you want to know how real Muslims act, my suggestion is that it makes sense to watch those who know their Qurans, are familiar with the Hadith (and/or other materials), are trying to follow the example of Muhammad.
Jesus and Muhammad were very different people. Because of the great difference in what they taught and the examples they gave in their lives, a true follower of Jesus does not tend to act in similar ways to a true follower of Muhammad.
If Muhammad was a prophet of God, then it follows that people should listen to him. If he was not a prophet of God, then people should not follow him. Whatever the case, people must acknowledge that there is some link between some manifestations of what it means to follow Muhammad’s message and the almost-too-many-to-count violent attacks that we have seen in our lifetimes at the hands of people with “Allahu akbar” on their lips.
Despite the hundreds of millions (perhaps) of people called Muslim yet who do not believe that people should be killed for leaving Islam, who do not believe that the victims of 9/11 somehow deserved it, who do not believe that everyone should be forced into compliance with Islam’s rules for the world, there are also tens of millions, or more, others who do understand the Quran mostly according its traditional meanings, who do take the life and example of Muhammad as a model to be emulated, who do believe that Islam rightly should conquest until it rules, that people should be killed for leaving Islam, and so forth.
Why? Because Muhammad actually taught such things. He did have people assassinated for criticizing him. He did commend the killing of people for leaving Islam. He did practice violent conquest and he did commend it (within certain rules) as a general ongoing rule for his community.
Some of these people who follow some manifestation of what we might call traditional Islam are those who would strive up to and including laying down their lives “in the path of Allah” — a common quranic refrain referring to spending and fighting in service of Allah (Q2:154, 2:190, 2;195, 2:218, 2:244, 2:246, 2:261, 2:262, 3:13, 3:157, 3:167, 3:169, 4:75, 4:76, 4:84, 4:95, and so on – there are several dozen occurrences of this phrase used in this way inside the Quran). What it means to fight “in the path of Allah” is understood differently by different Muslims; for some it does not include violence but is limited to striving to live morally, carry out the obligations. For others fighting in the path of Allah very much includes its more literal meanings, which tend to match the context of the delivery during Muhammad’s lifetime, and the meanings attributed to them by most of the classical Quran commentaries.
Their precise ideology aside, the nineteen bad guys of 9/11 certainly fall into the category of Muslims who were in some way reading the Quran, practicing their faith, and taking note (whether perfectly or not is a discussion for Islamic theologians and not the rest of us) of the example of Muhammad, and by all accounts trying to take it seriously.
Early the morning of that day, these individuals, having planned this day for months, boarded four commercial planes in the eastern United States. Shortly after takeoff, they stormed the cockpits, seizing control of the vessels along with their unsuspecting passengers. In the next minutes, they together transformed these vehicles into weapons of mass destruction that were immediately employed for the purposeful destruction of thousands of men, women, little boys, and little girls.
What happened on that day was a surprise to myself and others with eyes open only for its magnitude and level of depravity. As to its likely religious motivation, figuring that out was difficult only for some members of the chattering elites who habitually contort themselves to accommodate the pleasant but false belief that “all the world’s religions teach basically the same thing.” When the second plane struck, literally nobody thought that the people behind it were Christian, or Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, or Shinto. Sure, it could have been an act by a foreign nation seeking to engage us in war, as at Pearl Harbor. But really, I think most honest people would admit they had a sense fairly quickly that these acts were being done by Muslims. Why do you suppose that is?
This article is not a call to bash Muslims. Please don’t. I love my Muslim friends, many of whom were horrified by 9/11. And everyone deserves to be treated as an individual.
What I am hoping by writing these things is that more people will leave aside this silly notion that ideas don’t matter and aren’t linked to real life.
The cover photo on this article is an image from Inspire magazine, produced by another man, an American named Anwar al-Awlaki. This guy spent his last years producing glossy magazines telling others how to make bombs out of commonly available materials, explaining from the Quran and hadith literatures why others should engage in activities like those of the 9/11 hijackers, honoring “martyrs” (shuhadā’) who had carried out acts of terrorism, and stuff like that. Thankfully he was killed by drone strike a number of years ago.
Whoever you are today, whether Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Atheist, Buddhist, Hindu, Agnostic, or something else, and of whatever race or national origin, may I encourage you to consider what happened on 9/11 and pledge never again to doubt the power of ideas to inspire acts of evil, nor ever again to say that all beliefs are somehow the same.