Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them, forsake them in beds apart, and beat them. Then if they obey you, take no further action against them. Surely God is high, supreme (4:34).

  Can we imagine seeing men on the march in defense of their right to beat their wives? And if we do see it, then what? Would that win hearts and minds? The martyrs of the required revolution would be sustained by two obvious truths: the binding authority of scripture, all over the world, is very seriously questioned; and women, by definition, are not a minority. They would know, too, that their struggle is a heroic assault on the weight of the past—the alpweight of fourteen centuries.

  Attentive readers may have asked themselves what it is, this ridiculous category, the unknown known. The unknown known is paradise, scriptural inerrancy, God. The unknown known is religious belief.

  All religions are violent; and all ideologies are violent. Even Westernism, so impeccably bland, has violence glinting within it. This is because any belief system involves a degree of illusion, and therefore cannot be defended by mind alone. When challenged, or affronted, the believer’s response is hormonal; and the subsequent collision will be one between a brain and a cat’s cradle of glands. I will never forget the look on the gatekeeper’s face, at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, when I suggested, perhaps rather airily, that he skip some calendric prohibition and let me in anyway. His expression, previously cordial and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my wife, and my children was something for which he now had warrant. I knew then that the phrase “deeply religious” was a grave abuse of that adverb. Something isn’t deep just because it’s all that is there; it is more like a varnish on a vacuum. Millennial Islamism is an ideology superimposed upon a religion—illusion upon illusion. It is not merely violent in tendency. Violence is all that is there.

  In Philip Larkin’s “Aubade” (1977), the poet, on waking, contemplates “unresting death, a whole day nearer now”:

  This is a special way of being afraid

  No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

  That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

  Created to pretend we never die…

  Much earlier, in “Church Going” (1954), examining his habit of visiting country churches and the feelings they arouse in him (chiefly bafflement and boredom), he was able to frame a more expansive response:

  It pleases me to stand in silence here;

  A serious house on serious earth it is,

  In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

  Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

  And that much never can be obsolete,

  Since someone will forever be surprising

  A hunger in himself to be more serious,

  And gravitating with it to this ground,

  Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

  If only that so many dead lie round.

  This is beautifully arrived at. It contains everything that can be decently and rationally said.

  We allow that, in the case of religion, or the belief in supernatural beings, the past weighs in, not at two thousand years, but at approximately five million. Even so, the time has come for a measure of impatience in our dealings with those who would take an innocent personal pronoun (which was just minding its own business) and exalt it with a capital letter. Opposition to religion already occupies the high ground, intellectually and morally. People of independent mind should now start to claim the spiritual high ground, too. We should be with Joseph Conrad:

  The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is—marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural, which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity.

  Whatever my native modesty may be it will never condescend to seek help for my imagination within those vain imaginings common to all ages and that in themselves are enough to fill all lovers of mankind with unutterable sadness.

  (Author’s Note to The Shadow-Line, 1920)

  SEPTEMBER 2006. The Observer

  “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta”

  No physical, documentary, or analytical evidence provides a convincing explanation of why [Muhammad] Atta and [Abdulaziz al-]Omari drove to Portland, Maine, from Boston on the morning of September 10, only to return to Logan on Flight 5930 on the morning of September 11.

  —The 9/11 Commission Report

  1

  On September 11, 2001, he opened his eyes at 4 a.m., in Portland, Maine; and Muhammad Atta’s last day began.

  What was the scene of this awakening? A room in a hotel, of the type designated as “budget” in his guidebook—one up from “basic.” It was a Repose Inn, part of a chain. But it wasn’t like the other Repose Inns he had lodged at: brisk, hygienic establishments. This place was ponderous and labyrinthine, and as elderly as most of its clientele. And it was cheap. So. The padded nylon quilt as weighty as a lead vest; the big cuboid television on the dresser opposite; and the dented white fridge—where, as it happened, Muhammad Atta’s reason for coming to Portland, Maine, lay cooling on its shelf. The particular frugality of these final weeks was part of a peer-group piety contest that he was laconically going along with. Like the others, he was attending to his prayers, disbursing his alms, washing often, eating little, sleeping little. (But he wasn’t like the others.) Days earlier, their surplus operational funds—about $26,000—had been abstemiously wired back to the go-between in Dubai.

  He slid from the bed and called Abdulaziz, who was already stirring, and perhaps already praying, in the room next door. Then to the shower and the water closet: the chore of ablution, the ordeal of excretion, the torment of depilation. He activated the shower nozzle and removed his undershorts. He stepped within, submitting to the cold and clammy caress of the plastic curtain on his calf and thigh. Then he spent an unbelievably long time trying to remove a hair from the bar of soap; the alien strand kept changing its shape—question mark, infinity symbol—but stayed in place; and the bar of soap, no bigger than a bookmatch when he began, barely existed when he finished. Next, as sometimes happens in these old, massive, and essentially well-intentioned and broad-handed hotels, the water gave a gulp and then turned, in an instant, from a tepid trickle to a molten blast; and as he struggled from the stall he trod on a leaking shampoo sachet and fell heavily and sharply on his coccyx. He had to kick himself out through the steam, and rasped his head on the shower’s serrated metal sill. After a while he slowly climbed to his feet and stood there, hands on hips, eyes only lightly closed, head bowed, awaiting recovery. He dried himself with the thin white towel, catching a hangnail in its shine.

  Now, emitting a sigh of unqualified grimness, he crouched on the bowl. He didn’t even bother with his usual scowling and straining and shuddering, partly because his head felt dangerously engorged. More saliently, he had not moved his bowels since May. In general his upper body was impressively lean, from all the hours in the gym with the “muscle” Saudis; but now there was a solemn mound where his abdominals used to be, as taut and proud as a four-month pregnancy. Nor was this the only sequela. He had a feverish and unvarying ache, not in his gut but in his lower back, his pelvic saddle, and his scrotum. Every few minutes he was required to wait out an interlude of nausea, while disused gastric juices bubbled up in the sump of his throat. His breath smelled like a blighted river.

  The worst was yet to come: shaving. Shaving was the worst because it necessarily involved him in the contemplation of his own face. He looked downward while he lathered his cheeks, but then the chin came up and there it was, revealed in vertical strips: the face of Muhammad Atta. Two years ago he had said goodbye to his beard, after Afghanistan. Tangled and oblong and slightly off-center, it had had the effect of softening the disgusted lineaments of the mouth, and it had wholly concealed the frank animus of the underbite. His insides were seized, but his face was somehow incontinent, or so Muhammad Atta felt. The detestation, the detestation of everything, was being sculpted on it, from within. He was amazed that he was still allowed to walk the streets, let alone enter a building or board a plane. Another day, one more day, and they wouldn’t let him. Why didn’t everybody point, why didn’t they cringe, why didn’t they run? And yet this face, by now almost comically malevolent, would soon be smiled at, and perfunctorily fussed over (his ticket was business class), by the doomed stewardess.

  A hypothesis. If he stood down from the Planes Operation, and it went ahead without him (or if he somehow survived it), he would never be able to travel by air in the United States or anywhere else—not by air, not by train, not by boat, not by bus. The profiling wouldn’t need to be racial; it would be facial, merely. No sane man or woman would ever agree to be confined in his vicinity. With that face, growing more gangrenous by the day. And that name, the name he journeyed through life under, itself like a promise of vengeance: Muhammad Atta.

  In the last decade, only one human being had taken obvious pleasure from setting eyes on him, and that was the Sheikh. It happened at their introductory meeting, in Kandahar—where, within a matter of minutes, the Sheikh appointed him operational leader. Muhammad Atta knew that the first thing he would be asked was whether he was prepared to die. But the Sheikh was smiling, almost with eyes of love, when he said it. “The question isn’t necessary,” he began. “I see the answer in your face.”

  Their Coglan Air commuter flight to Logan was scheduled to leave at six. So he had an hour. He put on his clothes (the dark blue shirt, the black slacks), and settled himself at the dresser, awkwardly, his legs out to one side. Two documents lay before him. He yawned, then sneezed. While shaving, Muhammad Atta, for the first time in his life, had cut himself on the lip (the lower); with surprising speed the gash settled into a convincing imitation of a cold sore. Much less unusually, he had also nicked the fleshy volute of his right nostril, releasing an apparently endless supply of blood; he kept having to get up and fetch more tissues, leaving after him a paper trail of the staunched gouts. The themes of recurrence and prolongation, he sensed, were already beginning to associate themselves with his last day.

  Document number one was emblazoned on the screen of his laptop. It was his will and testament, composed in April 1996, when the thoughts of the group had turned to Chechnya. Two Moroccan friends, Mounir and Abdelghani, both devout, had been his witnesses, so he had included a fair amount of formulaic sanctimony. Any old thing would do. “During my funeral, I want everyone to be quiet because God mentioned that he likes being quiet on three occasions: when you read the Koran, during the funeral, and also when you are crawling.” Crawling? Had he mistyped? Another provision stared out at him, and further deepened his frown: “The person who will wash my body near my genitals must wear gloves on his hands so he won’t touch my genitals.” And this: “I don’t want pregnant women or a person who is not clean to come and say goodbye to me because I don’t approve of it.” Well, these anxieties were now academic. No one would say goodbye to him. No one would wash him. No one would touch his genitals.

  There was another document on the table, a four-page book-let in Arabic, put together by the Information Office in Kandahar (and bound by a grimy tassel). Each of them had been given one; the others would often produce their personal copy and nod and sway and mutter over it for hour after hour. But Muhammad Atta wasn’t like the others (and he was paying a price for it). He had barely glanced at the thing until now. “Pull your shoelaces tight and wear tight socks that grip the shoes and do not come out of them.” He supposed that this was sound advice. “Let every one of you sharpen his knife and bring about comfort and relief of his slaughter.” A reference, presumably, to what would happen to the pilots, the first officers, the flight attendants. Some of the Saudis, they said, had butchered sheep and camels at Khaldan, the training camp near Kabul. Muhammad Atta did not expect to relish that part of it: the exemplary use of the box cutters. He pictured the women, in their uniforms, in their open-necked shirts. He did not expect to like it; he did not expect to like death in that form.

  Now he sat back, and felt the approach of nausea: it gathered round him, then sifted through him. His mind, inasmuch as it was separable from his body, was close to the “complete tranquillity” praised and recommended by Kandahar. A very different kind of thirty-three-year-old might have felt the same tranced surety while contemplating an afternoon in a borrowed apartment with his true love (and sexual obsession). But Muhammad Atta’s mind and his body were not separable: this was the difficulty; this was the mind–body problem—in his case fantastically acute. Muhammad Atta wasn’t like the others, because he was doing what he was doing for the core reason. The others were doing what they were doing for the core reason too, but they had achieved sublimation, by means of jihadi ardor; and their bodies had been convinced by this arrangement and had gone along with it. They ate, drank, smoked, smiled, snored; they took the stairs two at a time. Muhammad Atta’s body had not gone along with it. He was doing what he was doing for the core reason and for the core reason only.

  “Purify your heart and cleanse it of stains. Forget and be oblivious to the thing which is called World.” Muhammad Atta was not religious; he was not even especially political. He had allied himself with the militants because jihad was, by many magnitudes, the most charismatic idea of his generation. To unite ferocity and rectitude in a single word: nothing could compete with that. He played along with it, and did the things that impressed his peers; he collected quotations, citations, charities, pilgrimages, conspiracy theories, and so on, as other people collected autographs or beer mats. And it suited his character. If you took away all the rubbish about faith, then fundamentalism suited his character, and with an almost sinister precision.

  For example, the approach to the question of women: he found the blend of aggression and alarmism highly congenial. In addition, he liked the idea of the brotherhood, although of course he exhaustively despised the current contingent, particularly his fellow pilots: Hani (the Pentagon) he barely knew, but he was continuously enraged by Marwan (the other Twin Tower) and almost fascinated by the pitch of his loathing for Ziad (the Capitol)…Adultery punished by whipping, sodomy by burial alive: this seemed about right to Muhammad Atta. He also joined in the hatred of music. And the hatred of laughter. “Why do you never laugh?” he was sometimes asked. Ziad would answer, “How can you laugh when people are dying in Palestine?” Muhammad Atta never laughed, not because people were dying in Palestine, but because he found nothing funny. “The thing which is called World.” That, too, spoke to him. World had always felt like an illusion—an unreal mockery.

  “The time between you and your marriage in heaven is very short.” Ah yes, the virgins: six dozen of them—half a gross. Muhammad Atta, with his two degrees in architecture, his excellent English, his excellent German: Muhammad Atta did not believe in the virgins, did not believe in the Garden. How could he believe in such an implausibly, and dauntingly, priapic paradise? He was an apostate: that’s what he was. He didn’t expect paradise. What he expected was oblivion. And, strange to say, he would find neither.

  He packed. He paused and stooped over the dented refrigerator, then straightened up and headed for the door.

  In its descent the elevator, with a succession of long-suffering sighs and flabby, juddering curtseys, stopped at the twelfth, the eleventh, the tenth, the ninth, the eighth, the seventh, the sixth, the fifth, the fourth, the third, and the second floors. Old people, their faces flickering with distrust, inched in and out; while they did so, one of their number would press the open-doors button with a defiant, Marfanic thumb. And at this hour too: it was barely light. Muhammad Atta briefly horrified himself with the notion that they were all lovers, returning early to their beds. But no: it must be the sleeplessness, the insomnia of age—the dawn vigils of age. Their efforts to stay alive, in any case, struck him as essentially ignoble. He had felt the same way in the hospital the night before, when he went to see the imam…Consulting his watch every ten or fifteen seconds, he decided that this downward journey was dead time, as dead as time could be, like queueing, or an interminable red light, or staring stupidly at the baggage on an airport carousel. He stood there, hemmed in by pallor and decay, and martyred by compound revulsions.

  Abdulaziz was waiting for him in the weak glow and piped music of the lobby. Wordless, breakfastless, they joined the line for checkout. More dead time passed. As they fell into step and proceeded through the last of the night to the parking lot, Muhammad Atta, in no very generous spirit, considered his colleague. This particular muscle Saudi seemed as limply calflike as Ahmed al-Nami—the prettyboy in Ziad’s platoon. On the other hand, Abdulaziz, with his softly African face, his childish eyes, was almost insultingly easy to dominate. He had a wife and daughter in southern Saudi Arabia. But this was like saying that he had a flatbed truck in southern Saudi Arabia, so little did it appear to weigh on him. He knew the Koran by heart and had also performed certain prayer-leading duties at his local mosque. And yet it was Abdulaziz, and not the apostate, who carried the knife, Abdulaziz who was ready to apply it to the flesh of the stewardess.