Tigers

The fighters of Flight 93

Lyra Nacke, whose uncle Louis died on Flight 93, visited the memorial wall near Shanksville, Pennsylvania in 2011. MICHAEL WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY IMAGES

Nineteen. Weird number. There were 19 total hijackers on September 11.

Evidently, the plan was to have 20, five per plane; one pilot plus four for muscle. But there was a little whoopsie, a hiccup, and a day that Mohammed Atta waited at an airport in Florida to pick up a guy who had been turned away by immigration. Someone somewhere decided to go ahead all the same. So four guys would hijack United Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco.

I don’t know who made that decision for Al Qaeda, but surely that person knows the work of Sayyid Qutb, who Paul Berman called “the philosopher of Islamic terror” in The New York Times. Qutb has been derided as a nutjob, and much of his work is unavailable. But Berman read everything of Qutb’s that he could get his hands on, and wrote that Qutb is unnervingly smart, nuanced, and not entirel…