The Terror Attacks

What Kind of Muslims Wrote the Letter?

The letter released by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as having been found in the belongings of accused hijacker Muhammad Atta (and in similar versions in two other hijackers' effects) has stirred some controversy in the Arab world and elsewhere over some curiosities of expression which some have claimed no pious Muslim would have used. Conspiracy-minded Middle Easterners have seized on some of these to claim that the letter is a forgery. In fact, the letter may simply be evidence (there is other evidence as well) suggesting that the followers of Usama bin Ladin are not as orthodox as they often claim to be, though it may also merely be the individual expressions of whoever wrote it, whether one of the hijackers or someone else in their organization.

An article by Robert Fisk in Britain's Independent on September 29 represents one example of a published critique. But it also indicates some of the problems involved in generalizing too much about the nature of the letter when so little is known about the actual beliefs of the person who wrote it. Fisk, working apparently from excerpts of a translation published in the Washington Post the day before, notes that "The document begins with the words: ‘In the name of God, the most merciful, the most compassionate ... In the name of God, of myself, and of my family'"; Fisk rightly notes that this is not the standard Muslim basmala, which would invoke God's name but not oneself or one's family.

But complicating matters is the fact that the phrase quoted does not seem to appear in the four pages of Arabic text released by the FBI and on display at the FBI website at http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/attack/arabic/letter.htm. The Post excerpts seem in other ways not to exactly match the FBI text, and may have been made from a different copy of the letter; at one point the Post account referred to a section headed "The Last Night" as being on page three of the letter, but the FBI text has that page, including the section "The Last Night" (al-layla al-akhira) as the first page.

Other critics have noted what they claim is Christian or other imagery in the letter's treatment of death, and like Fisk have questioned the phrase "the time of fun and waste is gone". But much of this imagery is not unknown in Islam, but has more in common with Sufi (mystical) texts than with rigid orthodoxy. Indeed the letter seems to imply a certain redemptive power of death to forgive sins which have been committed, which may explain the reported drinking and womanizing of the hijackers, who did not behave in rigorous Muslim ways prior to the attack: they may have seen their impending deaths as washing away whatever carnal sins they might commit.

Westerners tend to automatically assume that "fundamentalists" generally are rigidly orthodox in their teachings, and many mainstream Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood are exactly that. Most Islamists disdain Sufism or even denounce it as heresy or unbelief.

But there is another strain in extremist Islamist thought which, if not exactly Sufi, is rather unorthodox in its approach. Often this strain adopts themes from the messianic expectation of a Mahdi in the end-times, and sees current events in apocalyptic terms. Some of the more radical Egyptian groups have, in the past, showed leanings of this sort, and the group which seized the Sacred Mosque in Mecca in 1979 was explicitly Mahdist. This is a complex issue and one which is hard to analyze because it draws on elements of popular, as opposed to codified, Islam; it is not that taught in the schools.

The Taliban of Afghanistan have some elements which have never quite seemed to fit their pretended Sunni orthodoxy, for example. Though most of their rank and file were trained in schools associated with the highly conservative Sunni Deobandi school of and Pakistan, their leader, Mullah Mohammad ‘Umar (Profile, this issue) uses the title Amir al-Mu'minin. Many Islamist groups favor restoration of the Muslim Caliphate, and this title ("Commander of the Faithful") is a traditional one given the Sunni Caliph; but ‘Umar does not meet the qualifications demanded by traditional Sunni scholarship, such as descent from the tribe of Quraysh. There seems to be at least some hint of a more messianic, unconventional use of the term Amir al-Mu'minin, though the title can be and is used by others, for example the King of Morocco, who is, however, a descendant of the Prophet.

Of course, as many have noted, the killing of innocents, even in a just war, is prohibited by Islamic law, and the perpetrators of the attacks clearly follow an unconventional interpretation of Islam. Bin Ladin's famous 1998 fatwa declaring "Jihad against Jews and Crusaders" follows traditional jurisprudence in the sense of citing classical sources for his arguments and thus takes the form of a fatwa, but is issued by a man without formal religious training (though it uses the title of "Sheikh" for Bin Ladin) and without authority to issue fatwas. Clearly Bin Ladin's interpretation of Islam is eccentric at best: it may be far more heterodox than has been appreciated.

Precisely because Islam has no formalized hierarchy, there is an enormous range of practice and interpretation to be found. Sufi elements sometimes intrude into popular Islam even where the official Islam of the mosques and schools disdain them. Many aspects of Islam as practiced by ordinary Muslims (such as veneration of saints) are frowned upon by orthodox scholars. There is nothing in the letter that cannot be found somewhere in the vast tapestry of Islamic belief and practice, but the letter is clearly not written by someone steeped in the orthodoxy of the schools.

Nor should the so-called "Sufi" elements be misinterpreted. The letter is not Sufi in the traditional sense, but does seem to draw elements of personal discipline from the tradition of Sufi self-discipline, and some of the imagery may similarly be from that tradition.

Too close an analysis of the letter may not be very productive because it is unclear who wrote it. One of the hijackers? Atta himself? Someone else? But in any event, attempts to discredit the letter on the grounds that "no pious Muslim" could have written certain of its phrases overlooks the fact that a non-Muslim forger would probably have produced a text that was far closer to the orthodox tradition than to fringe and popular expressions of heterodox Islam.

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