Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists by Scott Atran Page B
Authors: Scott Atran
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Quds mosque on Steindamm Strasse in 1995, later joined there by Marwan and Ziad. (Marc Sageman’s recent interviews with their friends tell of them trying so very hard to obtain a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the anti-Semitic tract concocted by the czarist police to point the seething anger of Russian peasants away from the regime and at the Jews. But in Germany, such books, by law, can’t be sold.) 2
A score of other co-religionists from those college days led these four middle-class Arab adventurers to Al Qaeda. They first came to meet one another at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, or at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences near the Al Quds mosque. But it was in not in classes or in the prayer room that they radicalized one another; it was in schmooze sessions, sometimes at the mosque, but more often in dorms and cafeterias, halal butcher shops and fast-food eateries, barbershops, campus steps, and libraries.
Sageman and I visited the typically German middle-class neighborhood in Harburg, a suburb of Hamburg, where the 9/11 plotters and many of their friends lived. Germans call it a spiesser neighborhood, meaning prim and proper and bordering on teddy-bear kitsch. The campus of the nearby Technical University is small and the student atmosphere pleasant, especially on those sparse occasions when the sun is out. It’s hardly a hotbed of radical activity.
So how did it happen?
According to the 9/11 Commission: “Although Bin Laden, [Mohammed] Atef and [Khaled Sheikh Mohammed] initially contemplated using established Al Qaeda members to execute the planes operation, the late 1999 arrival in Kandahar of four aspiring jihadis from Germany suddenly presented a more attractive alternative … the enormous advantage of fluency in English and familiarity with life in the West…. Not surprisingly, Mohammed Atta, Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, Marwan al Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah would all become key players in the 9/11 conspiracy.” 3
These observations hint at two important features of global jihad from its inception: planning is flexible and opportunistic, and key personnel come knocking at the door to enlist in jihad rather than being drawn in or lured by others. The Hamburg group wasn’t recruited or brainwashed. Like most jihadi groups, it self-radicalized and then went looking for action. It was actually a fluid, constantly evolving network of friends and fellow travelers in search of making sense of their lives and the world, who flowed in and out, depending on the changing states of their visas, studies, jobs, girlfriends and wives, problems with the authorities, and other happenings in their lives. Some left because they felt the group was becoming too radical; others came in because of their attraction to increasingly radical words and the promise of radical deeds. There was no “organization” to speak of, certainly no “cells” to begin with.
The oldest part of the group was a small circle of members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood who had sought refuge in Germany in the late 1980s, after the Syrian government massacred thousands of their brethren. The Hamburg circle of Syrian brothers would congregate and discuss their angry vision of Islam and the world at three mosques near the central train station in Hamburg: Al Quds (The Holy, and the name for Jerusalem), Al Nur (The Light), and Al Muhajrin (The Immigrants).
The future 9/11 plotters would go from Harburg by subway to the mosques. They’d have to pass a row of sex shops on Steinheim Strasse to get to Al Quds and Al Nur. This, we were told, disturbed their religious sensibilities (Atta’s in particular; he would sometimes insist, even though his friends might balk, that they make a long detour toward Alster Lake and back around to avoid seeing the women). Most notable was Al Quds, known as the Moroccan mosque because most of its attendees stemmed from that North African country, including its fiery jihadi preacher from Tangiers,
A score of other co-religionists from those college days led these four middle-class Arab adventurers to Al Qaeda. They first came to meet one another at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, or at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences near the Al Quds mosque. But it was in not in classes or in the prayer room that they radicalized one another; it was in schmooze sessions, sometimes at the mosque, but more often in dorms and cafeterias, halal butcher shops and fast-food eateries, barbershops, campus steps, and libraries.
Sageman and I visited the typically German middle-class neighborhood in Harburg, a suburb of Hamburg, where the 9/11 plotters and many of their friends lived. Germans call it a spiesser neighborhood, meaning prim and proper and bordering on teddy-bear kitsch. The campus of the nearby Technical University is small and the student atmosphere pleasant, especially on those sparse occasions when the sun is out. It’s hardly a hotbed of radical activity.
So how did it happen?
According to the 9/11 Commission: “Although Bin Laden, [Mohammed] Atef and [Khaled Sheikh Mohammed] initially contemplated using established Al Qaeda members to execute the planes operation, the late 1999 arrival in Kandahar of four aspiring jihadis from Germany suddenly presented a more attractive alternative … the enormous advantage of fluency in English and familiarity with life in the West…. Not surprisingly, Mohammed Atta, Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, Marwan al Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah would all become key players in the 9/11 conspiracy.” 3
These observations hint at two important features of global jihad from its inception: planning is flexible and opportunistic, and key personnel come knocking at the door to enlist in jihad rather than being drawn in or lured by others. The Hamburg group wasn’t recruited or brainwashed. Like most jihadi groups, it self-radicalized and then went looking for action. It was actually a fluid, constantly evolving network of friends and fellow travelers in search of making sense of their lives and the world, who flowed in and out, depending on the changing states of their visas, studies, jobs, girlfriends and wives, problems with the authorities, and other happenings in their lives. Some left because they felt the group was becoming too radical; others came in because of their attraction to increasingly radical words and the promise of radical deeds. There was no “organization” to speak of, certainly no “cells” to begin with.
The oldest part of the group was a small circle of members of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood who had sought refuge in Germany in the late 1980s, after the Syrian government massacred thousands of their brethren. The Hamburg circle of Syrian brothers would congregate and discuss their angry vision of Islam and the world at three mosques near the central train station in Hamburg: Al Quds (The Holy, and the name for Jerusalem), Al Nur (The Light), and Al Muhajrin (The Immigrants).
The future 9/11 plotters would go from Harburg by subway to the mosques. They’d have to pass a row of sex shops on Steinheim Strasse to get to Al Quds and Al Nur. This, we were told, disturbed their religious sensibilities (Atta’s in particular; he would sometimes insist, even though his friends might balk, that they make a long detour toward Alster Lake and back around to avoid seeing the women). Most notable was Al Quds, known as the Moroccan mosque because most of its attendees stemmed from that North African country, including its fiery jihadi preacher from Tangiers,
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