Staff Reports
Ayaan Hirsi‑Ali has dropped a provocation this week: a Tablet Magazine essay arguing that Mohamed Atta — the lead 9/11 hijacker — was driven not by Western grievances but by Islamic teachings and a religious readiness to die for his cause. Her piece leans hard on Atta’s 1996 “last will and testament” and recent polling about Muslim American attitudes to make a civilizational point many on the left have been unwilling to make.
Ayaan Hirsi‑Ali’s Tablet essay: the new claim
Hirsi‑Ali, who is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and founder of the AHA Foundation, frames her essay as a corrective. She argues that earlier explanations — humiliation, foreign policy, poverty, or lack of integration — miss the obvious: Atta left a religiously framed will and lived by an ideology that made violence sensible to him. Tablet prints passages from that will and uses them as the hinge of the argument. The essay has already set off predictable retorts and praise across opinion pages.
What Atta’s will actually shows
The will reproduced in Tablet tells us something plain and unsettling. Lines like “I don’t want any women to go to my grave at all during my funeral or on any occasion thereafter” and strict ritual burial instructions point to a worldview rooted in strict religious practice, not a shopping list of geopolitical complaints. That document has long been in the public record and is reflected in archival reporting and the post‑9/11 investigations. Hirsi‑Ali’s point is simple: ideology — not merely grievance — can and did turn some men into killers.
Pew data, sympathy, and why it matters
Tablet also leans on recent Pew polling that shows elevated favorable ratings for Hamas among Muslim respondents in a national sample. The headline number — which has already been seized on by commentators — raises real questions about sympathies for Islamist causes among a subset of the population. Yes, subgroup polling has larger margins of error and context matters. But shrugging and pretending the numbers do not merit serious attention is either naive or willfully blind.
The political consequence: stop pretending ideology doesn’t matter
The larger fight here is political. For a quarter‑century many Western elites preferred explanations that kept religion in a private box. That made for comforting talk about “root causes” and policy fixes that sidestepped ideology. Hirsi‑Ali’s essay is a sharp reminder that refusing to name the problem does not make the problem go away. If Atta’s will and the polling data tell us anything, it’s that we need honest debate about Islamist ideology and how it spreads — without turning normal, law‑abiding Muslims into targets of guilt by association.
What conservatives should push for now
Practical steps flow from the argument Hirsi‑Ali makes. We should demand clearer vetting of radical teachings, better counter‑radicalization programs, and a refusal by policymakers and cultural elites to paper over ideology for the sake of niceness. That doesn’t mean broad‑brush attacks on faith. It does mean treating violent, expansionist ideologies for what they are and defending liberal institutions that let women and men live freely. If the left won’t look, the rest of us must — and we should do it with plain language, not euphemism.
