Epilogue
On September 11,2001, nineteen Muslim extremists hijacked
four passenger jets, flying two of them into the World Trade
Center in New York City and one into the Pentagon in Wash-
ington, D.C., killing more than three thousand people. The
fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania. The hijackers were dis-
ciples of Osama bin Laden, whose militant brand of Islam was
deeply influenced by Sayyid Qutb.
The ferocity of this attack against the United States took
the fundamentalist war against modernity into a new phase.
When this book was first published in 2000, I had predicted
that if Muslims continued to feel that their religion was under
attack, fundamentalist violence was likely to become more
extreme and to take new forms. Some of the hijackers fre-
quented night clubs and drank alcohol, which is forbidden
in Islam, before boarding the doomed planes. They were
quite unlike normal Muslim fundamentalists, who live strictly
orthodox lives and regard night clubs as symbols of the
jahiliyyah that is forever and for all time the enemy of true
faith.
The vast majority of Muslims recoiled in horror from this
September apocalypse and pointed out that such an atrocity
contravened the most sacred tenets of Islam. The Quran con-