The Architect of 9/11

As an urban planning graduate student at the Hamburg University of Technology, Egyptian architect Mohamed Atta researched what he saw as the intrusions of Western modernist architecture and Western tourists into traditional Arab cities. Atta's thesis criticized the damage done to the traditional character of the historic city of Aleppo, Syria by Western architecture and urban planning and proposed how to undo that damage. In a graduate fellowship project, he similarly criticized an Egyptian government-sponsored historic preservation proposal for the Islamic quarter of Cairo which called for emptying the neighborhood of its residents and replacing them with actors in period dress as part of a tourism development scheme.

Far more than a record Atta's architectural taste, his thesis provides a window into how he saw the history of the Middle East from the time of Mohamed's conquests right up to the present tensions with the West. Understanding Atta's academic research and writing—both its legitimate insights and its egregious mistakes—is crucial to understanding the worldview that led him to knock down the West's best-known modernist skyscrapers on the morning of September 11, 2001.

Stories

September 09, 2009 | Slate

Mohamed Atta Confronts the Historic Muslim Monuments and Modern High-Rises of Cairo

Mohamed Atta became an architect at Cairo University, in the city where he came of age. The Egyptian capital is a fascinating, albeit poorly maintained, open-air museum, spanning 5,000 years of architectural history. In its recent past—since Napoleon's 1798 invasion, in Egypt's near-geologic time frame—the city has lurched from Western model to Western model, trying in vain to reclaim its lost glory. In the Abdin neighborhood where Atta grew up, grand Parisian apartment buildings constructed in the 19th century now sit caked in dust, their windows shattered.

September 08, 2009 | Slate

What Can We Learn About Mohamed Atta From His Work as a Student of Urban Planning?

A month after 9/11, Fouad Ajami wrote in the New York Times Magazine, "I almost know Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian [at] the controls of the jet that crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center." While the Middle East scholar had never met the lead hijacker, Ajami knew his type: the young Arab male living abroad, tantalized by yet alienated from Western modernity, who retreats into fundamentalist piety.