What Flight 1073 Reveals About Western Denial

Investigators are asking sensible questions about FlyDubai Flight FZ1073. How did a reportedly Omani national end up crewing an Israel-bound flight when Oman and Israel have no formal ties? Israeli media have reported that officials were weighing how to grant the pilot permission to fly there at all. What security clearances did he hold? Where did the weapon come from? Was Iran involved, as some outlets suggest?

These are good questions, and I hope they get answered. But they are all questions of how. The Western instinct, lamentably, is to stay inside them, because the question of why requires something our political culture has forgotten how to do: reading what the attacker’s own religion commands.

Here is what is alleged so far. Israeli officials, including Defense Minister Israel Katz, say the co-pilot, an Omani national, stabbed the captain mid-flight and tried to crash a plane carrying 174 passengers, 27 of them children. Katz called it “an attempted jihadist terror attack.” His motives have not been declared, but the UAE’s attorney general has opened an inquiry into whether terrorism was involved. Early reports diverged, with some describing a hijacking and others a dispute between the pilots, and accounts of the rescue differ too. Some credit Israeli passengers, while others describe off-duty pilots and cabin crew storming the cockpit. President Isaac Herzog said a passenger who was a dentist treated the wounded captain. Whoever did what, they saved lives.

Some outlets also report that the co-pilot refused to shake hands with women, and commentators have seen that as a sign of “radicalization.” I would put it differently. What Westerners call radicalization is merely a return to Islamic roots, and for a Muslim, the roots are the Quran and the Hadith. Radicalization, then, simply means following the Islamic sources literally. Western media treat the word as a mysterious illness, yet it is better understood as a reading method.

That is the blind spot. The West built its public life on separating religion from the state, and that was a wise settlement for Western history. But it left us without a category for a “faith” that is also a system of law, politics, and warfare. Our elites regard religion as private and subjective, never to be judged on its own doctrinal terms. So, every act of Islamic violence is reflexively explained by poverty, colonialism, mental illness, or an “extremism” that floats free of any text.

In doing so, we lose the ability to see that vast numbers of Muslims take the Quran and Hadith as literally binding, and that many of them read the commands to fight unbelievers, subdue Christians and Jews, and expand the abode of Islam as standing obligations, not relics.

Muslim literalists did not invent this program. They follow it, apply it, and cite it. They point to the Quran’s command to fight Christians and Jews until they submit and pay tribute while humiliated. They point to the so-called Verse of the Sword, which calls for slaughtering the unbelieving polytheists, and to keep fighting until religion is entirely for Allah.

What many fail to consider is that Islamic “sacred” texts reserve a special category for the Jews: they are the enemies. The Quran declares that the people most intense in hostility toward believers are the Jews, and it prohibits Muslims from taking Jews and Christians as allies. Then come the statements and teachings of Muhammad, the Hadith, in which he says the Last Hour will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, so that even the stone behind which a Jew hides will cry out for a Muslim to kill him.

For Muslims who hold these commands and texts sacred, no reinterpretation works, and no allegorical or contextualized reading helps. For them, martyrdom is the greatest prize and the only guaranteed path to eternal bliss. The world is eternally divided into the abode of Islam, where Sharia governs as Allah’s law for all, and the abode of war, which is everywhere that has not yet submitted to and accepted Islam. Living peacefully in the abode of war is only a temporary truce, never a permanent condition.

In the secular West, many cannot comprehend this kind of religious zeal. That is why many Western analysts are repeatedly and perpetually surprised. They wonder why these Muslims shout “Allahu Akbar,” why they single out Jews with particular intensity, and why no deal, no prosperity, and no normalization seems to calm them.

Westerners quite often refuse to look at the texts the attackers treat as divine and non-negotiable. As long as they remain in this fanciful dream, they will go on being surprised.

We cannot yet read what was in this co-pilot’s mind, but we can read the texts that men like him believe and cherish. On FZ1073 there was nowhere for anyone to hide. There were 174 people more than six miles in the air, 27 of them children, and the one man with access to the controls appears to have had a knife. A society that will not read what its enemy reads will go on being shocked, one narrowly failed attempt at a time.

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Ayman S. Ibrahim, Ph.D., is the Bill and Connie Jenkins Professor of Islamic Studies; Director, Jenkins Center for the Christian Understanding of Islam; and Director of Research Doctoral Studies at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

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