William Kilpatrick, Crisis Magazine: Like many Americans, I didn’t know much about Islam before the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. And, to tell the truth, even after 9/11 I wasn’t inclined to look too deeply into the matter. The events of 9/11, disturbing as they were, were not quite enough to overcome a certain inertia in me. Neither was the widespread jubilation in parts of the Muslim world that followed the attack, nor the knowledge that Islamic terrorists had carried out similar attacks before—the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the simultaneous truck bomb attacks on U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998, and the suicide attack on the USS Cole on October 12, 2000.
Was there something about Islam that prompted such violence? Or were the terrorists distorting and misinterpreting their religion? The consensus seemed to favor the latter view, and for a long while I was inclined to go along with it. One of the benefits of taking the consensus view was that it absolved me from having to read the Koran and other Islamic source materials—texts which I somehow intuited would not make for enjoyable reading. Full article is here.
