ABSTRACT
The September 11th terrorist attack has profoundly marked our collective consciousness. In this act of mass murder, aeroplanes full of passengers were crashed into skyscrapers as human bombs, causing massive destruction, with harrowing, deadly, and traumatic consequences for the victims. Studies of psychological defence mechanisms have shown that we react with disbelief to the perception of massive, horrific, and seemingly senseless destruction. Some fundamentalist movements have aligned themselves with a nationalist ideology, thereby assuming the form of nationalist–religious variants. Following the failure of social and political reform efforts in the Arab states after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the fundamentalist movement grew increasingly in strength, thanks in small measure to the founding of the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt around 1920. Ritual purity plays a significant role in Islam, and, therefore, it is not surprising that fantasies of purity have extraordinary significance for self-identity in Islamism.
