by Sohail Hashmi

About the author: Sohail Hashmi teaches international relations at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts.

The men who perpetrated the carnage on September 11, 2001, left a trail of clues about how they accomplished their mission, but virtually nothing about why. They left behind no suicide notes explaining what motivated them to kill thousands and die in the process, only the vaguest exhortations to be steadfast in the quest of paradise. But if they were indeed inspired by Osama bin Laden and his supporters, as the Bush administration promises to demonstrate, then they probably died for no more than an idea, the idea of jihad.

This term invokes for many in the West the notion of a holy war conducted by zealots in the name of their God with the aim of...