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When I taught Religious Studies at Georgia State University, I used to assign Nazi theology and biblical arguments for slavery. I wanted my students to understand how Christianity has been used to justify what they knew to be horrors. Their initial reaction was almost always to protest that anyone who could enslave another human being or justify murdering Jews was not a real Christian. The intent of such protests—withholding the imprimatur of Christianity from evildoers—was laudable, but this stance also had the effect of insulating Christianity from criticism. Christians who owned slaves or ran concentration camps were not really Christians at all.
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Since 9/11, many Americans, most notably President George W. Bush, have made a similar move concerning Islam and terrorism: If Islam is, as the president has repeatedly said, a "religion of peace," those who committed the atrocities of 9/11 cannot have been real Muslims. Muslims, it seems, can do no wrong; the Muslims who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center were not really Muslims at all.
The root meaning of the term Islam is submission, and classically a Muslim is anyone who submits to God by uttering with faith, "There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is the messenger of God." Over time, however, many Muslims have developed far more stringent qualifications for the category of real Muslim. Some Sunni Muslims see all Shiite Muslims as pretenders to the true faith. Some Shiites view Sunnis likewise. And some Muslims have even stricter qualifications for their fellow travelers. Members of al–Qaeda, for example, believe that any so–called Muslim who holds views about Islam different from their own is not a real Muslim.
The Islamic tradition has a word—takfir—for this sort of exclusivist thinking, which goes all the way back to the first few decades after Muhammad's death. And what takfir amounts to is excommunication by imagination.
To outsiders, it might appear that such debates about who is and who is not a true Muslim are nothing more than intramural skirmishes. Why should American Christians, for example, care about how Muslims in Pakistan or the Middle East patrol the border zones of their faith? But the implications of this ongoing war of words are immense, since it is the idea of takfir that opened the Islamic tradition to the horrors of 9/11.
The Looming Tower, a masterful narrative history by New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright, traces the steps and missteps—in the United States, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere—that brought us 9/11. Wright focuses on four people—Osama bin Laden, the Egyptian intellectual Ayman al–Zawahiri, a Saudi intelligence officer named Prince Turki al–Faisal, and an FBI counterterrorism agent named John O'Neill.
Along the way he offers his readers a series of telling details about what is arguably the event of this generation. Here readers will learn that bin Laden's father and brother died in separate plane crashes, and that bin Laden (like President Bush?) watched Bonanza as a child. They will also learn that at one point, bin Laden attempted to downshift al–Qaeda into an agricultural organization, and that this organization's first traitor used some of his $1 million reward money to buy a winning ticket to the New Jersey lottery. Finally, and most eerily, they will learn that, after being edged out of the FBI in August 2001 for (among other things) his obsession with al–Qaeda, the FBI agent John O'Neill began working at the World Trade Center. Only days after he started this new job he would be numbered among the dead.
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