On Sept. 11, 2001, I was 13, and my mother asked me to take my younger brother to the barbershop near our home in Amman, Jordan. When we walked in, the barber wasn't cutting hair. Everyone was staring at the television. Al Jazeera was showing smoke pouring from one of the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan. Then we watched as the second plane hit.
We cheered because we were told that God was punishing America.Last week, I was at Ground Zero — the very site of the horrific act I celebrated as a young Muslim. Now, as a Christian, I'm participating in Infidel Awareness Month to honor the victims and help educate others about the dangerous ideologies I once adhered to. I grew up in a society that was overwhelmingly Muslim.
We weren't given much room to develop our own view of America or the West. The verdict had already been handed to us. America was the Great Satan. All non-Muslims, politician or plumber, soldier or mother, businessman or child, belonged to the same group: they were infidels. In 2007, I converted to Christianity, and I found that Christians divide the world into believers and nonbelievers too. On Sept.
11, 2015, a construction crane collapsed at the Grand Mosque in Mecca, killing Muslim pilgrims during the pilgrimage season. I was at church that day and heard my fellow Christians saying that God was punishing Muslims. After the Holocaust, ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) rabbis and their followers explicitly interpreted the Holocaust as divine punishment for Jewish sins.
Fallen man continually tries to remake God into what we want Him to be — doctor, judge, parent, friend, enforcer, avenger and so on. It’s human nature to try to turn Him into a divine ally of our tribe, our politics and our resentments. We