2 of 7

• April 1996: Egyptian Islamic militants open machine-gun fire and throw hand grenades at Western tourists outside their Cairo hotel; 18 killed.
• November 1997: 58 foreign tourists and four Egyptians are massacred by members of the Gamat al-Islamiya (Islamic Group) in Luxor, Egypt.
• August 1998: Bombs explode at two U.S. embassies in Africa, killing 10 in Tanzania and 253 in Kenya; thousands more are injured.
• October 2000: The USS Cole is attacked in Yemen by Islamic suicide bombers; 17 sailors die.

And during this period, a number of plots by militant Muslims were, thank God, thwarted by U.S. and international intelligence—for example, a 1995 plot to assassinate the Pope when he visited the Philippines, and that same year, the so-called Project Bjinka, which planned to down 11 large U.S. passenger jets over the Pacific.

The seemingly escalating violence of religious terrorism is not a figment of paranoid imagination. Secular terrorists with modest political objectives (freeing prisoners, for example) rarely aim for indiscriminate killing since that would be counterproductive to their negotiations with governments. Even religious terrorism with local goals (as seen in Ireland, for example) restricts itself to political enemies. But many Muslim terrorists have, instead of such limited objectives, a cosmic sense of injustice or righteousness that permits anything in the name of God.

The rhetoric of key Islamic militants bears this out.

A Muslim theologian of the Shiite branch of Islam, Ayatollah Baqer al-Sadr: "The world as we know it today is how others shaped it. We have two choices: either to accept it with submission, which means letting Islam die, or to destroy it, so that we can construct a world as Islam requires."

Another Shiite theologian, Mustafa Chamran: "We are not fighting within the rules of the world as it exists today. We reject all those rules."

For this reason Hoffman chillingly concluded in 1998, "The pattern of religion-inspired terrorism over the past two years alone suggests that the potential for still more and even greater acts of violence cannot be prudently discounted."

The Reasons for 'Insanity'
During the week after the attack on America, stark words were used to describe the perpetrators: evil, barbarians, cowards, insane, and mad, among others. The choice of terms was understandable given the enormity of the atrocity. But such language trivializes the problem, because the terrorists are anything but cowardly madmen.

"I have been studying terrorists and terrorism for more than 20 years," says Hoffman. "Yet I am still always struck by how disturbingly 'normal' most terrorists seem when one actually sits down and talks to them." Mark Juergensmeyer of the University of Santa Barbara would no doubt agree. He interviewed a number of terrorists for his book Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (University of California, 2000), and the interviews reveal people with whom we can, for the most part, identify.

A 1997 interview with Mahmud Abouhalima, a convicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, is a case in point. For Abouhalima, "Islam is a mercy," because it saved him from his youthful decadence, a "life of corruption—girls, drugs, you name it." Islam has given his life meaning and purpose. He compares life without religion to a pen without ink: "An ink pen, a pen worth $2,000, gold and everything in it—it's useless if there's no ink in it. That's the thing that gives life, the life in this pen, this soul." Secularism "has none" of this life. Secularists "are just moving like dead bodies." Militant Muslims, like Abouhalima, are models of devotion to both their faith and their families.

next page... |  2 of 7

share this page

September (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45