Sadly, Ruth passed away shortly after publication of her book. I wish to dedicate this issue of the Newsletter to her—and to provide my reflections on her insights.

After the September 11, 2001 suicide bombings, President Bush declared that the perpetrators “hated” Americans. Ruth Stein suggests that this was not the case. Rather, the suicide bombers were driven by love of God. What’s more, in performing acts of violence, they imagined they were carrying out the will of God by destroying infidels who refused to acknowledge the greatness of Allah.

Stein’s analysis begins with a close reading of a letter written by Mohammed Atta to his fellow suicide bombers—found in his luggage in a car left at Boston’s Logan airport. This letter, Stein says, detailing what had to be done in order to gain entry into paradise, discussed God’s “satisfaction with the act to be accomplished.” Based on Mohammed Atta’s letter and other data, Stein concludes that the suicide bombers conceived of their actions as a solemn, ritual performance—at the end of which supplicants would receive God’s approval by “doing what pleases God—purifying the world of contaminating infidels.”

Stein is disturbed by the conclusion she reluctantly reaches: that there was an intimate connection between devotion to God and mass murder. Mohammed Atta’s letter, Stein says, does not speak of hatred. Rather, “absurdly and perversely, it is about love. It is about love of God.”

The suicide bombers sacrificed themselves and others according to their belief that they were carrying out God’s will by destroying infidels: people who refused to worship and submit to the God that they worshipped and to whom they had submitted. Their acts of violence sought to demonstrate that their God possessed an implacable will. It was as though the terrorists declared through their actions: “Do you doubt the power of our God? This is the fate of those who refuse to worship and submit to him. As I sacrifice my life for Allah, so shall you.”

Stein theorizes more broadly about religious and ideological forms of violence in terms of a dynamic she calls “identificatory love:” the desire of the individual to merge with an idealized object. This wish for symbiotic omnipotence takes the form of submitting or abjecting one’s self to a remote, superhuman entity.

Stein observes that forms of behavior prohibited for individuals regularly are “practiced, condoned, even sanctified by the group.” In other words, laws or rules that govern individuals do not apply equally to groups. What is it about societal groups that allows ordinary morality and ethics to be overturned? Stein hypothesizes that violence perpetrated by collectives (taking the form of atrocities or mass murder) grows out of identificatory love.

Large-scale forms of violence are undertaken in the name of an ideal object that can move groups to decree the “liquidation of anything that challenges the validity and superiority” of this idealized object. The ideal functions to “mediate, ratify, and sanctify the actions of a perpetrator on a victim. Forms of behavior deemed taboo or criminal on the individual level may be “condoned and encouraged when perpetrated collectively.”

Islamic terrorism—radical fundamentalism—is based on identification with an idealized object, Allah. Those who embrace this object—Allah’s worshippers—are conceived as good and righteous; whereas those who do not are conceived as evil. What constitutes evil for the radical fundamentalist is the refusal to worship the one true God: the God worshipped by the believer. People who do not worship this one, true God are experienced as an affront: to the believer, and to God.

According to Bin Laden, Allah created human beings “for the purpose of worshipping him.” What’s more—and here is where terroristic violence begins—Bin Laden finds unbearable the idea that others do not embrace and worship Allah as he does. The Quran, Bin Laden says, urges believers to “fight for the cause of Allah and kill pagans wherever they are found;” to “smite the neck of those who believe not in Allah.” The purpose of jihad is to rouse believers in order to “restrain the fury of non-believers.”

Why does Bin Laden imagine that non-believers are possessed by “fury”? Why does the non-believer evoke anxiety and rage in the mind and heart of a believer like Bin Laden—to the extent that he feels he must kill (or kill off) the non-believer?

The terrorist commits acts of violence in the name of maintaining his tie to an idealized object with which he identifies. It would appear that the non-believer or infidel is experienced as a threat to one’s tie to the object. Somehow, for certain fanatic believers, the very existence of people who do not worship their God acts to shatter or disintegrate one’s tie to the beloved object.