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Commentary Footnotes

December 2002

Footnotes for
"Mr. Atta's Meditations, Sept. 10, 2001:
A Close Reading of the Text "
by Bruce Lincoln
(University of Chicago Divinity School)

¹ Excerpted from Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). © 2002 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

² The second copy to be recovered was found in the vehicle used by Nawaf Alhazmi before he boarded American Airlines Flight #77 in Washington, and the third at the crash site of United Airlines Flight #93 in Stony Creek Township, Pennsylvania. Facsimiles of the original Arabic holograph were made available by the FBI here. Although press reports consistently referred to a five-page document, the FBI website reproduced only four, the first page of the original apparently having been withheld. Translation following the Observer, September 30, 2001, available at here. This translation was initially prepared for The New York Times by Capital Communications Group, a Washington-based international consulting firm and by Imad Musa, a translator for the firm.

³ Three authoritative oral traditions (hadith) are also introduced, always framed as words of the Prophet (§§23, 27, 28).

⁴ Sûra 9.12-14. Cf. the use of scripture in §30: "When the confrontation begins, strike like champions who do not want to go back to this world. Shout, "Allahu Akbar," because this strikes fear in the hearts of the non-believers. God said: "Strike above the neck, and strike at all of their extremities." The Quranic passage cited is Sûra 8.12-14, which reads as follows.

When the Lord was revealing to the angels,
"I am with you; so confirm the believers.
I shall cast into the unbelievers' hearts
Terror; so smite above the necks, and smite every finger of them!"
That, because they had made a breach
with God and with His Messenger; and
whosoever makes a breach with God and with
His Messenger, surely God is terrible in retribution.
That for you; therefore taste it; and
That the chastisement of the Fire is for the unbelievers.

The promise of chastisement by fire for unbelievers is especially ominous when set in homologic relation to the events of 9/11.

⁵ Qutb, Milestones, pp. 38-40. See the discussion of Shepard, "Jahiliyyah in the Thought of Sayyid Qutb," pp. 12-15.

⁶ This is not to say their motives were exclusively religious. Anger over American foreign policy toward Palestine and Iraq, for instance, surely played some role in prompting the attacks of 9/11. Here, however, I would make two points: 1) Such considerations go completely unmentioned in the instructions text (perhaps because they are taken for granted); 2) In other texts where they do enter, the discourse itself conflates "religious" and "political" aspects, which can only be separated by an outside observer insensitive to their intimate interrelation. Thus, to pursue the example, "Palestine" and "Iraq" do not figure simply as nation-states and political entities. Rather, they are of concern precisely because they are Muslim nations or, more simply, part of "Islam" (dar al-Islam, on the significance of which, see the discussion in Chapter Three of Holy Terrors).

⁷ This, of course, is a classic theme, treated not only in Kant's Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, but in different ways and to different purposes also in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov, and Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals. Professional students of religion have often been a good deal more superficial in treating the issues raised by such troubling practices as collective suicide, spousal immolation, and clitoridectomy, where they can usually be counted on to smooth out the apparent contradiction between the ethical and the religious. Toward that end, scholars who harbor a distinctly non-academic reverence for their object of study can be counted on to deploy one of two favored arguments: a) It is ethnocentric to ignore or undervalue the profound significance these practices have in their proper cultural context (i.e., being religious, they must be good); and b) The perpetrators are frauds, hypocrites, dupes, or members of "cults" (i.e., being bad, they can't really be religious). In either case, the goal is the same and the project transparently apologetic.

⁸ For summary discussions of these and other related figures, see Ali Rahnema, ed., Pioneers of Islamic Revival (London: Zed Books, 1994). Specifically on the Muslim Brotherhood, Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993; 1st ed. 1969).

⁹ §21 of the instructions draws a related contrast between those whose strength is grounded in religious faith and those who depend on technology.

All of their equipment and gates and technology will not prevent, nor harm, except by God's will. The believers do not fear such things. The only ones that fear it are the allies of Satan, who are the brothers of the devil. They have become their allies, God save us, for fear is a great form of worship, and the only one worthy of it is God. He is the only one who deserves it. He said in the verses: "This is only the Devil scaring his allies, who are fascinated with Western civilization, and have drank the love [of the West] like they drink water [unclear] and have become afraid of their weak equipment, "so fear them not, and fear Me, if you are believers."

¹⁰ Cf. Mark Juergensmeyer's discussion of the theatricality of most religio-political violence, Terror in the Mind of God: the Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 119-144.