The Book Stacks

by Aram Schefrin

In Chapter 23 of Marwan: The Autobiography of a 9/11 Terrorist, as the hijackers meet in a Las Vegas hotel room to discuss which planes they are going to take, there is an unexpected knock at the door. Everyone’s afraid they’ve been discovered. But it turns out to be a man from Domino’s with two thin-crust pizzas Marwan has ordered up.

This completely fictional incident is a key to understanding my approach to Marwan.

For one thing, it illustrates that people do not stop living their normal lives while they, for instance, plot mass murder. We tend to think of these men as monomaniacs. But even monomaniacs have to eat.

But, more importantly, it illustrates another point.

Although some of them were highly educated in Saudi Arabia, most of the Saudi muscle brought in to handle the rough details of the hijacks had never been in the West before. Like bin Laden himself, all they knew of America was what they had seen on TV or what they had been told by others – and the effect of American policy in their own region. So they could not understand, and were indifferent to, what they saw here.

But the pilots were a very different matter. Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Midhar lived in San Diego. Hani Hanjour had spent a lot of time in California, Arizona and Florida. Ramzi al-Shibh, Mohammad Atta, Marwan and Ziad Jarrah were living in sophisticated Hamburg, Germany, and Jarrah came from a westernized Lebanese family. Atta, Marwan and Jarrah spent over a year in Florida. All of them had a great deal of exposure to Western ways. They knew very well what they were attacking.

Al-Shibh, because of his religion, his personality and his politics, was immune to the attractions of the West. Atta had consciously rejected them, out of outrage at Western doings in the Middle East. But al-Hazmi and al-Midhar immersed themselves in some Western behavior – particularly involving sex shows, alcohol and prostitutes (much like the Saudi princes on the French Riviera). Jarrah was nearly an American kid: he had been educated in a Christian school, he played basketball, and his romance with a Turkish girl was very un-Islamic. The perception that these men were from an alien culture is, therefore, only partly true.

That was the point which interested me most about these people – and the reason I felt I could approach them from Western eyes and turn them into characters Westerners could understand because of their somewhat Western behavior. And I wanted to make one of the characters almost completely Western – in the way he thinks and the things he does and believes – so that the story rang true to American readers. With the actual histories of these characters, I didn’t think that was farfetched.

I knew that in Germany Marwan had rented fancy red sports convertibles to make the club circuit. And there were other details I knew about him – plus the fact that there were many, many details completely unknown – that made him the perfect nearly blank-slate candidate to illustrate this point of view.

Although he was raised in an Islamic backwater, he was influenced by American TV and very aware of what was happening in Europe and America – and went to Germany because he wanted to play a part in that. I suspected that his personal weaknesses and flaws had led a kid who might have become another Silicon Valley clone to become, instead, a killer – or, as he saw it, a soldier of Islam. He was the perfect character to illustrate the process by which your perfectly sane neighbor boy might find himself doing insane things.

The point of Marwan, and of the book, being: some of these people were not so different from us. To understand what they did – and what others like them may yet do – I think it’s important to look at them as we would at any other sad case and try to learn what it might take to stop the continuing creation of people like them.

And that’s what Marwan is about.