We remember where we were that horrible morning eight years ago today. We remember the sick pit in the stomach, the rancid taste of fear in our mouth gaping in disbelief as we stared at our television screens listening for commentators to make sense of the senseless. I remember watching a shot of a group of New Yorkers staring up at the inferno and reading their lips, all of them. In near unison they mouthed, “Oh, my God!”
How did it happen? Why? What led these men to such wickedness?
On September 10, 2001 Satam M.A. Al Suqami, Marwan Al-Shehhi, Fayez Banihammad and Mohand Alshehri, checked in to the Milner Hotel in Boston, called an escort service and that evening enjoyed the spendy “company” of female companions. The next morning they were among those who boarded, hijacked, and crashed four airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania corn field.
What drove these young men to such desperate evil? Not economic want. Most came from middle class families and had enjoyed the benefits of progressive western university educations. What ideas fueled their suicides? The puzzle perplexes as surely as it terrorizes us.
The riddle grows more puzzling when we consider the fact that their brand of Islam prescribes absolute sexual fidelity. A man must live purely; a women must not show their face to anyone other than her husband. Why would these men impose damnation upon themselves by indulging their appetites just hours before their death?
Perhaps they were playing a religious “Ponzi” scheme.
Islamic piety consists of five pillars.
* Faith in the Oneness of God and acceptance of the Prophet Muhammad;
* Daily prayers;
* Concern for the needy;
* Self-purification through fasting;
* A pilgrimage to Makkah sometime in one’s life.8
Those who achieve these goals gain paradise after death. Those who do not will endure eternal suffering. High stakes. The downfall for these young men seems to have been the fourth pillar: the demand for purity. Most of the 9-11 terrorists had sexual addictions. When they came to study in the West they had fallen into the snare of accessible pornography. Though they hated their weaknesses, they could never rise to the standard prescribed by their religion. Guilt and hopelessness doomed them to suffer the consequences of a compromise that could never be atoned. Somewhere in the course of their inner struggles they turned their guilt and fear into bitter hatred of the culture that had robbed them of Paradise.
Then they found a loophole: Jihad. By dying for Islam, a few radical Mullahs claimed, they could instantly shed all sinful condemnation. Jihad gave them a chance to come clean, a scam to cheat and trump a law that doomed them.
The outcome turns our stomach. But we best take care. Doesn’t the horrible twisted logic that deceived these men bears some resemblance to the ultimatums offered by many religions of the world? The garbage of our lives has to go somewhere and the purpose of many religious rituals is to offer some process for dealing with it. We can’t simply wish it away. Like toxic waste, the consequences of our choices have to find some final resting place or doom us under the ugly judgment of moral responsibility. If offered a final solution, wouldn’t anyone take it? Of course. The fact their supposed “solution” was itself evil doesn’t change the common motive driving them. Perhaps we’re not so far removed from desperate evil as we might want to believe.
Knowing – and experiencing – grace, knowing at the deepest point of our souls, that God himself forgives, and cleanses, and makes us new, gives us freedom from even the darkest shadows of our soul. This is the wonder of our relationship with Jesus: We don’t have to atone for our own sin. We don’t have to resort to rash and desperate violence, even on our selves. We can trust Jesus, who is the toxic waste dump of the universe, to remedy the matter. We can know that here and now!
Ask and receive.
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