Beyond the Catalyst: The Human Cost, State Responsibility, and the Islamic Legal Perspective on the Post-9/11 Era

Abstract

Twenty-five years after the 11 September 2001 attacks, the foundational narrative of the "War on Terror" remains legally, historically, and epistemologically unexamined. This article approaches the anniversary through the dual lenses of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh, فقه) and critical international legal theory.

It argues that the perpetrators of 9/11 operated within a radicalized interpretive fringe of the Islamic legal tradition, weaponizing specific hermeneutic tools to justify asymmetrical violence in response to decades of structural subjugation. Rather than reducing Islamic law to a monolithic verdict, this paper interrogates the internal logic of the attackers' legal reasoning while demonstrating where it fractures against classical uṣūl al-fiqh (أصول الفقه, principles of jurisprudence). Furthermore, it critiques the historical preconditions of the attacks, the evidentiary anomalies surrounding the official narrative, and the visceral reality of the subsequent wars, in which "American democracy" was imposed by fire and sword across the Arab and Muslim world. Ultimately, it applies the doctrine of State responsibility to demonstrate that the foreseeable devastation of millions of lives was not a tragic accident but a calculated geopolitical project, and that the international legal order's refusal to hold state actors accountable constitutes a profound asymmetry of justice.

About the Author

Lukian Pudliak is a PhD Researcher in law at Trinity College Dublin, supervised by Prof. Neville Cox. His thesis, "Islamic Jurisprudential Approaches to Muslim Integration in Irish Secular Legal Frameworks," examines how classical Islamic law can inform and facilitate the integration of Muslim communities within secular states. Lukian’s work is grounded in the principle that genuine mutual understanding requires a deep, respectful engagement with the cultural and jurisprudential roots of a community, translating foundational legal traditions into practical frameworks for modern coexistence.

Introduction

A quarter of a century after 11 September 2001, the legal and political architecture built in the name of counterterrorism remains intact. The dominant Western narrative posits that the attacks were an unprovoked assault by an entire civilisation, born of irrational hatred, necessitating a limitless global war. As a researcher at the intersection of Islamic law and public international law, I submit that this narrative is not merely politically expedient; it is jurisprudentially bankrupt, historically illiterate, and evidentiarily suspect.

To understand the post-9/11 order, we must look beyond the official consensus. We must examine the contested hermeneutics of Islamic jurisprudence that the attackers mobilized, the geopolitical motives of the architects of the war, the anomalies in the physical evidence, the deliberate obfuscation of intelligence, and the visceral reality of what was done to Muslim and Arab populations in the name of "liberation." True legal accountability requires holding both non-state actors to the rigorous standards of Islamic jurisprudence and state actors to the standards of international truth and State responsibility. This article does not seek to flatten complexity into propaganda. It seeks to restore the complexity that propaganda destroyed.

I. Hermeneutics of Violence: Islamic Jurisprudence as a Contested Landscape

To approach the 11 September attacks through the lens of Islamic law requires abandoning the reductive binary that either fully validates the perpetrators or entirely excommunicates them from the faith. Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh, فقه) is not a monolith; it is a vast, historically layered, and deeply contested hermeneutic tradition.[1] Like any major legal and religious system, from the scholastic debates of medieval Canon law to the interpretive fractures within Rabbinic Judaism, it contains a spectrum of interpretations, ranging from the strict and literal to the contextual and pragmatic. To claim that the attackers simply "ignored" Islamic law is intellectually lazy; to understand the post-9/11 order, we must understand the potent, albeit dangerous, internal logic of their legal reasoning.

The architects of 9/11 did not operate in a theological vacuum.[2] Rather, they weaponized a specific, radicalized interpretive fringe of the tradition. Their methodology was heavily influenced by the hermeneutics of modern revivalist thinkers and the later fatwās (فتاوى, legal opinions) of Osama bin Laden, which redefined the classical concept of jihād (جهاد, struggle/effort) through the lens of absolute, asymmetrical defensive obligation (farḍ 'ayn, فرض عين, individual duty). In their legal reasoning, the presence of US troops in the Arabian Peninsula and the perceived devastation of the Muslim world by Western hegemony created a state of existential emergency that, in their view, suspended classical constraints on targeting.[3] They did not reject the framework of Islamic law; they stretched it to its absolute breaking point to accommodate a revolutionary political agenda.

However, when subjected to the rigorous scrutiny of classical uṣūl al-fiqh (أصول الفقه, principles of jurisprudence) and the traditional rules of al-siyar (السير, Islamic international law), this radical hermeneutic reveals profound methodological fractures. Classical jurisprudence, developed over centuries by the major schools of thought (madhāhib, مذاهب), insists on the institutionalization of force and the strict regulation of hostilities.[4] The classical rules of engagement prohibit the targeting of non-combatants, the destruction of infrastructure, and the violation of treaties. The perpetrators bypassed the traditional scholarly consensus (ijmā', إجماع) in favour of a rogue, individualistic ijtihād (اجتهاد, independent legal reasoning) that ignored the principle of proportionality (tanāsub, تناسب) and the higher objectives of the Sharia (maqāṣid al-sharī'ah, مقاصد الشريعة), specifically the preservation of life (ḥifẓ al-nafs, حفظ النفس).[5]

The tragedy of the post-9/11 era, therefore, is not merely that a radical interpretation of Islamic law was used to justify atrocity. The greater tragedy is that the Western political and legal establishment adopted this exact same radical hermeneutic as the authentic representation of Islam. By treating the fringe as the core, the architects of the "War on Terror" flattened a millennium of complex legal debate into a single, violent caricature. This allowed them to conflate the attackers' specific, contested legal reasoning with the beliefs of 1.8 billion Muslims, thereby manufacturing the legal and social justification for the collective punishment, the invasions, and the Islamophobia that followed.

II. The Architecture of Grievance: Structural Violence and Historical Causality

The violence of 11 September did not materialize from a theological vacuum, nor did it stem from an innate civilizational hatred of "freedom." To treat the attacks as an uncaused cause is to ignore the foundational principles of both international relations and human psychology. The attacks were a horrific, asymmetrical reaction to decades of structural violence, geopolitical subjugation, and policy decisions made by the United States and its allies.

Long before the planes hit the towers, the US and its coalition partners had engineered a landscape of profound suffering in the Muslim world. Following the 1991 Gulf War, the comprehensive sanctions regime imposed on Iraq was associated with severe humanitarian consequences for the civilian population. [6] When asked about this staggering mortality rate, the US Ambassador to the UN infamously replied that it was "worth it." This was not an isolated tragedy; it was state policy.

Furthermore, the permanent stationing of US troops in the Arabian Peninsula, the land of the Two Holy Mosques, following the 1990 war was viewed by millions of Muslims as a profound desecration and an occupation of sacred space.[7] The US and its allies routinely propped up brutal, secular autocracies across the Middle East, suppressing democratic movements and torturing dissidents to ensure the flow of oil and the security of Israel. The ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people, supported unconditionally by Washington, remained an open wound and a daily humiliation for the Arab and Muslim consciousness.

The attackers weaponized these very real, state-sponsored grievances. While their method a rogue ijtihād that bypassed classical constraints, is condemned by the mainstream consensus of Islamic jurisprudence, the causes of their radicalization were undeniably forged in the crucible of Western foreign policy. The US and its allies created the conditions of despair, humiliation, and structural violence that made such a reaction possible. To condemn the violence of 9/11 while absolving the structural violence that preceded it is a failure of legal and moral consistency.

III. The Geopolitics of Hatred and Evidentiary Anomalies

The conflation of Arabs and Muslims post-9/11 was not a rhetorical accident; it was a geopolitical necessity for the neoconservative project within the Bush administration. The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) had explicitly stated in 2000 that the process of transforming the US military for a new era of global dominance would be a long one, "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor."[8] When 9/11 occurred, it provided the exact catalyst required to justify a radical shift in global hegemony, military expansion into the Middle East, and the establishment of a permanent domestic security state. By conflating Arabs and Muslims, the state manufactured a domestic consensus for endless war. The hatred directed at Muslims was not a spontaneous public reaction; it was a cultivated resource, essential for the maintenance of the post-9/11 security paradigm.

Simultaneously, the official narrative relies on highly improbable physical evidence and strategic permissibility. The CIA's declassified Presidential Daily Briefs, particularly the August 2001 brief "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US," demonstrate that the US executive branch had specific, actionable intelligence regarding the threat of hijacked aircraft.[9] The systematic classification of the Joint Inquiry into the Intelligence Community's Activities, and the 28 redacted pages of the 9/11 Commission Report, suggest that the intelligence "failure" was legally and bureaucratically managed rather than merely accidental.[10] The truth of what the state knew, and what it chose to ignore or allow, remains hidden from humanity and from the millions who suffered the consequences.

Furthermore, the epistemological foundations of the official narrative rely on physical anomalies that strain the boundaries of credulity. Within hours of the attacks, before any comprehensive forensic investigation could be conducted, the highest levels of the US government definitively attributed the attacks to Osama bin Laden, bypassing standard legal requirements for evidence and due process. Even more anomalous is the physical evidence presented to the public: the "miraculous" survival of the hijackers' paper ID cards, passports, and flight training manuals, found intact in the pulverized rubble of the Twin Towers, which burned at temperatures sufficient to melt steel, and at the crash site in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.[11] Under any standard rules of legal evidence and forensic science, such anomalies require rigorous, independent, and transparent scrutiny. Instead, the public was asked to accept these evidentiary impossibilities as fact. When a state's foundational legal narrative relies on physical evidence that defies the laws of physics and chemistry, the narrative ceases to be law and becomes dogma.

IV. The Morning of the Attacks: Command, Control, and Strategic Permissibility

The executive response on the morning of the attacks further complicates the official timeline and raises profound questions about the chain of command. On the morning of 9/11, President George W. Bush was visiting the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Florida. At approximately 9:05 AM, while the President was being read a briefing, Chief of Staff Andrew Card leaned in and whispered, "America is under attack."[12]

Despite this explicit warning that the United States was actively being struck by hijacked aircraft, the President did not immediately leave the classroom, nor did he immediately assume the role of Commander-in-Chief to authorize defensive military scrambles. Instead, he remained in the classroom for approximately seven more minutes, demonstratively continuing to read "The Pet Goat" to a room of schoolchildren for the cameras, before being escorted out.

This prolonged inaction during the critical 90-minute window — while the second plane was in the air and the Pentagon was about to be struck — introduces severe legal and historical questions. The standard operating procedures for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) were designed to intercept hijacked aircraft.[13] Yet, on the morning of the most significant attack on US soil in history, the established protocols failed, and the chain of command appeared paralyzed. While the 9/11 Commission attributed this to "confusion," the visual record of the executive branch's calm, almost performative, delay in a school classroom, contrasted with the chaos in the skies, invites rigorous academic scrutiny regarding strategic permissibility. It raises the question of whether the failure to intercept was a mere bureaucratic breakdown, or a deliberate dereliction of duty that borders on complicity.

V. The Crusade of 'Democracy': Imposed by Fire and Sword

The state that managed the 9/11 narrative with such strategic permissibility was the same state that unleashed a visceral, brutal reality upon the Middle East. This radical paradigm of "civilizing violence" did not emerge in a vacuum; it is a recurring pathology of empire, present in the historical justifications of multiple religions and secular ideologies when they hold hegemonic power.

From the theological justifications of the Crusades to the Christian "Doctrine of Discovery" used to subjugate Indigenous peoples, and the secular "civilizing missions" of European colonialism in Africa and Asia, the legal architecture of exception remains identical. The language changes from "saving souls" to "spreading democracy" but the underlying paradigm is the same: the belief that the "Other" must be destroyed, subjugated, or remade in the empire's image to be considered fully human. The precondition for the post-9/11 devastation was this deep-seated Orientalist framework, which viewed the Arab and Muslim world not as sovereign equals, but as a blank canvas for Western salvation.

When this paradigm was unleashed upon the Middle East, it stripped away the abstract language of "collateral damage" and revealed a visceral, brutal reality. The imposition of "American democracy" was not achieved through ballots or civic engagement; it was imposed by fire and sword (ignem et gladium).

We must speak plainly about what this war looked like on the ground. It looked like the US military kicking down the doors of family homes in the dead of night. It looked like the desecration of the ḥurmah (حرمة, sacred inviolability), the sacred Islamic sanctity of the home and the family as fathers were dragged away in handcuffs, and women and children were forced to the floor at gunpoint. It looked like the summary execution of civilians at checkpoints, the use of white phosphorus in densely populated areas, and the reduction of entire neighbourhoods to radioactive dust.

The West spoke of "liberation," but the lived reality for Arabs and Muslims was an occupation characterized by home invasions, torture in prisons like Abu Ghraib, and the systematic dismantling of their societies. The radical paradigm demanded that Muslims prove their humanity by submitting to a foreign political system that was being literally bombed into their living rooms. To impose a political ideology through the barrel of a gun and the rubble of a destroyed hospital is not democracy; it is subjugation. It is a profound violation of both international human rights law and the Islamic principles of 'adl (عدل, justice) and amān (أمان, security/covenant of protection).

VI. State Responsibility and the Asymmetry of Justice

This brings us to the core of international legal accountability. Under the International Law Commission's Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts (ARSIWA), every internationally wrongful act of a State entails its international responsibility (Article 1). An internationally wrongful act exists when conduct consisting of an action or omission is attributable to the State under international law and constitutes a breach of an international obligation (Article 2).[14]

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a manifest violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter.[16] It lacked UN Security Council authorization and could not be justified under Article 51 (self-defence), as Iraq had not committed an armed attack against the United States. The Chilcot Inquiry concluded that the threat of Iraqi weapons was presented with a certainty the intelligence did not justify, and that peaceful options had not been exhausted.[18] When a state possesses the intelligence to know that an invasion lacks legal justification and that the destruction of a state's infrastructure will lead to mass civilian casualties, the resulting harm is not an "accident of war." It is a foreseeable consequence of an unlawful policy.[17]

Brown University's Costs of War Project estimates 905,000 to 940,000 direct deaths in the post-2001 wars, more than 400,000 of them civilians, and 3.6 to 3.8 million further deaths from hunger, disease, and ruined health systems.[19] The combined toll is at least 4.5 to 4.7 million. More than 38 million people were displaced.[19] The seventeen-fold rise in birth defects in Fallujah, the starvation in Afghanistan, and the collapse of entire healthcare systems are the mathematical certainty of high-explosive policy in dense urban environments. Under ARSIWA Article 31, the responsible State is under an obligation to make full reparation for the injury caused.[15]

Yet, the post-9/11 legal order has created a grotesque asymmetry in reparation. The victims of 9/11 have access to the US federal court system, the Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Fund, and ongoing civil litigation. Conversely, the Arab, Afghan, and Muslim victims of the "War on Terror" have been denied any comparable forum. The US military has consistently refused to pay reparations for civilian deaths caused by drone strikes and airstrikes, citing sovereign immunity and the political question doctrine. The global system of secret prisons, extraordinary rendition, and torture in which Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in a single month and later accepted as never having been a member of al-Qaeda violates the absolute prohibition of torture, a jus cogens norm.[20][21][22] European states that hosted CIA black sites have paid compensation, but the United States itself has entirely evaded accountability. This double standard is not just a moral failure; it is a systemic denial of the right to reparation under international law.

Conclusion: Toward a Dual Accountability

Twenty-five years after 9/11, the legal community must abandon the comfortable fiction that the "War on Terror" was a tragic but necessary response to an unparalleled evil. It was, in large part, a war of choice, built on manipulated intelligence, executed in violation of international law, and paid for with the lives of Arab and Muslim civilians. The state that failed to protect its own citizens on 9/11, and whose official narrative relies on evidentiary anomalies and historical obfuscation, has no moral or legal standing to dictate the terms of global justice.

We must recognize that the attackers operated within a radicalized interpretive frame of the tradition, mobilizing a specific hermeneutic of farḍ 'ayn (فرض عين) and emergency ijtihād (اجتهاد) that bypassed the classical consensus of ijmā' (إجماع) and the higher objectives of maqāṣid al-sharī'ah (مقاصد الشريعة). Their methodology constitutes a profound deviation from the mainstream tradition, but it was not a departure from the tradition entirely. More importantly, this radicalization was not born in a vacuum; it was a horrific symptom of a diseased geopolitical order, forged by decades of structural violence, sanctions, occupations, and the unconditional support of autocratic regimes by Western powers.

The Quranic principle that "no bearer of burdens shall bear the burden of another" (lā taziru wāziratan wizra ukhrā, لا تزر وازرة وزر أخرى) (Quran 6:164) is not merely a theological abstraction; it is a foundational rule of Islamic criminal jurisprudence that forbids collective punishment.[23] Yet the post-9/11 order was built on precisely this violation. The US and its allies cannot be permitted to use the crimes of a non-state actor as a circumstance precluding wrongfulness for their own violations of jus cogens norms.

The 2,977 victims of 9/11 have names, and their right to justice is absolute. But the 4.7 million dead, the 38 million displaced, and the millions subjected to institutionalized Islamophobia and violent occupation in the subsequent wars also have names. Islamic law demands justice for the innocent killed in New York, and it equally demands justice for the innocent whose homes were invaded, whose ḥurmah (حرمة) was violated, and whose lives were destroyed. It is time for the international legal order to recognize that the protection of civilian life is not a civilizational monopoly, and that State responsibility must apply to the architects of the post-9/11 devastation just as strictly as it applies to the hijackers. The truth, however heavily classified or deliberately obscured, remains the only legitimate foundation for law.

1. Lena Salaymeh, ‘Comparing Islamic and International Laws of War: Orthodoxy, “Heresy,” and Secularization in the Category of Civilians’ (2021) 69(1) American Journal of Comparative Law 136 https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcl/avab001 accessed 11 September 2026.

2. Mashood A Baderin, ‘Use of Force under Islamic Law’ (2013) 24(1) European Journal of International Law 343 https://doi.org/10.1093/ejil/chs092 accessed 11 September 2026.
3. Osama bin Laden and others, ‘Text of World Islamic Front’s Statement Urging Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders’ (Al-Quds al-Arabi, 23 February 1998), reproduced in George Washington University, National Security Archive https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/media/24212/ocr accessed 13 September 2026.
4. Ahmed Al-Dawoody, The Islamic Law of War: Justifications and Regulations (Palgrave Macmillan 2015).
5. UNICEF, ‘A Heavy Price for Children: Violence Destroys Childhoods in Iraq’ (UNICEF) https://www.unicef.org/mena/reports/heavy-price-children accessed 13 September 2026.
6. Project for the New American Century, Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century (September 2000) 51 https://ia803104.us.archive.org/24/items/RebuildingAmericasDefensesStrategyForcesAndResourcesForANewCentury/Rebuilding-Americas-Defenses.pdf accessed 13 September 2026.
7. Office of the Press Secretary, The White House, ‘The August 6, 2001 PDB’ (10 April 2004) https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040410-5.html accessed 11 September 2026.
8. US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 (2002) https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/9-11-reports/ accessed 13 September 2026.
9. National Institute of Standards and Technology, ‘FAQs - NIST WTC Investigation’ https://www.nist.gov/world-trade-center-investigation/study-faqs/wtc-investigation accessed 11 September 2026.
10. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report (2004) ch 1 https://www.govinfo.gov/features/911-commission-report accessed 13 September 2026.
11. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report (2004) ch 1 https://www.govinfo.gov/features/911-commission-report accessed 12 September 2026.
12. International Law Commission, ‘Draft Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, with Commentaries’ (2001) UN Doc A/56/10 https://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/commentaries/9_6_2001.pdf accessed 13 September 2026.
13. International Law Commission, ‘Draft Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, with Commentaries’ (2001) UN Doc A/56/10, art 31 https://legal.un.org/ilc/texts/instruments/english/commentaries/9_6_2001.pdf accessed 13 September 2026.
14. Charter of the United Nations (adopted 26 June 1945, entered into force 24 October 1945) arts 2(4), 51 https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text accessed 13 September 2026.
15. UN Security Council Resolution 1441 (2002), UN Doc S/RES/1441 (8 November 2002) https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/478123 accessed 13 September 2026.
16. UN Security Council Resolution 678 (1990), UN Doc S/RES/678 (29 November 1990) https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/102245 accessed 13 September 2026.
17. Iraq Inquiry, The Report of the Iraq Inquiry (2016) https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-report-of-the-iraq-inquiry accessed 11 September 2026.
18. Costs of War Project, ‘Civilians Killed & Displaced’ (Brown University) https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/costs/human/civilians-killed-displaced accessed 13 September 2026.
19. Neta C Crawford and Catherine Lutz, ‘Human Cost of Post-9/11 Wars: Direct War Deaths in Major War Zones’ (Costs of War Project, Brown University, 1 September 2021) https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/paper/human-cost-post-911-wars-direct-war-deaths-major-war-zones accessed 13 September 2026.
20. Stephanie Savell, ‘How Death Outlives War: The Reverberating Impact of the Post-9/11 Wars on Human Health’ (Costs of War Project, Brown University, 15 May 2023) https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/papers/how-death-outlives-war accessed 11 September 2026.
21. Samira Alaani and others, ‘Pilot Study of Congenital Anomaly Rates at Birth in Fallujah, Iraq, 2010’ (2012) 44(1) Journal of the Islamic Medical Association of North America https://doi.org/10.5915/44-1-10463 accessed 13 September 2026.
22. Samira Alaani and others, ‘Metal Contamination and the Epidemic of Congenital Birth Defects in Iraqi Cities’ (2012) 89 Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology 1118 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00128-012-0817-2 accessed 12 September 2026.
23. US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program (9 December 2014) https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/publications/CRPT-113srpt288.pdf accessed 11 September 2026.