https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/mohamed-atta-25-years-911

What Mohamed Atta Was Trying to Tell Us

After 25 years, it is time for the West to face the true cause of 9/11

September 8, 2026   by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

In April 1996, more than five years before he steered American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower, Mohamed Atta sat in a small Hamburg apartment and wrote his last will and testament. He was 27, an architecture student at the Technical University, the son of a Cairo lawyer, fluent in German, and living comfortably in one of the most affluent societies on earth.

Nothing in his circumstances compelled him to dwell on death. Yet he gave detailed instructions for the handling of his corpse. “I don’t want any women to go to my grave at all during my funeral or on any occasion thereafter,” he wrote. He did not want a pregnant woman, or “a person who is not clean,” to come and say goodbye. The man who washed his body should wear gloves so as not to touch his genitals. He was to be wrapped in three white pieces of unadorned cloth, laid on his right side facing Mecca, and buried “next to good Muslims.” His money was to be divided “according to the Muslim religion as almighty God has asked us to do.”

The document is among the most neglected pieces of evidence from Sept. 11 because it contradicts the explanations of the attack that most Western commentators preferred. Atta was not poor. He was not radicalized by drone strikes that had not yet happened, nor by American support for Israel. He was not in any formal or organizational sense an “Islamist.” Rather, he had an uncompromising and militant commitment to Islam that he was ready to die for.

Yet for 25 years Western elites repeatedly insisted that men like Atta must have been driven by something other than the culture and the faith that provided him with a lens through which his actions seemed both sensible and necessary. After 9/11, intellectuals and policymakers asked “what went wrong?” as though the source of Atta’s animus toward the West was shrouded in some deep mystery. In the Western experience, men had not killed other men over religious questions en masse since the end of the great religious wars of the 17th century. Culture, a term that was once understood to encompass a great many facets of human identity, experience, and belonging—religion included—had also been ruled out. Saying that cultural differences exist and should be respected was a foundation of the multicultural order; the idea that some cultures might lead people to murder each other, for reasons that do not appear in the Western rationalist list of sane causes, struck many Western liberals as too close to racism to bother arguing the point.

Since then, each time the West collided with Islam, much of the Western intellectual class reached for explanations that made sense within its own secular humanist categories: grievance, humiliation, underdevelopment, alienation, foreign policy frustration, or the failure of Western states to properly integrate men like Atta, who were, or must be, inherently no different than immigrants of similar age, class, and educational attainments from Vietnam or Poland, or anyplace else. Since all conflicts are material in origin, it was assumed that they could be settled though material means. And given the obvious superiority of Western values, as measured through the superior material attainments of the West, conflicts over land, jobs, dignity, sovereignty, or redistribution should be negotiated with the generosity appropriate to those who occupy positions of immense privilege and power, thanks to the inequities of European colonialism. If Muslim populations suffered from a democracy deficit, elections would reveal and moderate those demands. In every case, theology and culture were translated into psychology, economics, development policy, or diplomacy.

American leaders then added a second layer of denial. President George W. Bush stood at the Islamic Center of Washington to insist that “the face of terror is not the true faith of Islam.” Following Bush’s lead, after later atrocities in Paris, Brussels, Manchester, and elsewhere, Western leaders repeatedly said that the killers had “nothing to do with Islam.” At the same time, the notion of “Abrahamic faiths” was revived or normalized, as though Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were merely variations within one spiritual family, separated by temperament more than by theology or civilizational ambition.

After centuries of religious war, the West had concluded that privatizing faith was the price of stability and progress. Religion would become hobby, heritage, or private consolation; politics would be conducted in the cooler register of interests. Having made that bargain, Western societies forgot that secularism and pluralism were local settlements, not universal defaults, and so assumed that every rival civilization must ultimately favor the same compartmentalization. When confronted by an adversary for whom the public order was explicitly theological, and for whom the separation of sacred and political authority was itself an offense against God, the West did the only thing its own intellectual settlement allowed: It translated theology into categories it found more manageable.

As a result, for a quarter-century, America and the West have chosen to enmesh themselves with dysfunctional Muslim societies, with the goal of rectifying “what went wrong.” Simultaneously, they opened their doors to mass Muslim migration, taking in millions of refugees from war-torn societies that had notably failed to be transformed by the influx of American money, democracy experts, and boots on the ground. The failure of the Western secular faith in material reality to transform these shattered societies was dismissed as an accident, or as a consequence of how broken and needy these societies actually were. Surely the faith would prove its worth once the refugees arrived in America.

As it turned out, the prediction that a large-scale encounter between the populations of the Western nations and Muslim lands might bring about a meaningful social transformation was correct. What Western optimists failed to imagine was that their own societies would be reshaped in the image of the newcomers they sought to evangelize. By 2026, NYC had become a parade ground for Islamic terror groups, run by a foreign-born Muslim mayor who supported “globalizing the intifada” and whose wife celebrated Hamas’ massacre of Israelis. Nor were such attitudes unusual in a city where Muslim immigrants nearly outnumbered the city’s native Jewish population. A Pew Research poll released in July 2026 showed that 44% of Muslims in America held a favorable view of Hamas.

Stated differently, if America and the West went to war against an elite vanguard of Muslim extremists who used terrorism as its principal tool, it ended 25 years later with a self-inflicted defeat caused by misdiagnosing the enemy and importing culturally incompatible demographics that could be utilized by that vanguard, as well as by other political vectors, both domestic and foreign. After failing to defeat Muslim terrorists abroad, the West now finds itself fighting the same enemies at home, while watching their own countries transformed by the mass immigration of people who decidedly do not share the common Western fantasy that religion and culture are the source of merely superficial differences. The idea that there are barbarians who live outside the gates has long been part of the Western inheritance. The idea that bringing the barbarians inside the gates might result in the destruction of Western civilization was equally part of that inheritance, even if it was now forbidden to think it.

 

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