Was there something about Islam that prompted such violence? Or were the terrorists distorting and misinterpreting their religion?

Catholicism, Islam, and the Perils of 

Arguing from Authority

by William Kilpatrick

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.

There were two other factors, however, which prevented me from looking further. One was the reassurance offered by President Bush and other world leaders that Islam was a religion of peace. I didn’t know much about Islam, but I assumed that they and their expert advisors did, and so, for a while, I accepted their assessment. The other and more important factor was that what the Church had to say about Islam seemed to validate the consensus view. I was aware that the Catechism of the Catholic Church said something to the effect that Muslims, together with Catholics, worship the one God. And, on looking further into the matter, I found that the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate) had even more to say on the subject, namely that Muslims “adore the one God,” link their faith to Abraham, revere Jesus as a prophet, “honor Mary” and even “call on her with devotion,” and that “they value the moral life.”

These statements seemed to confirm the prevailing notion that terror attacks had nothing to do with Islam, but rather were the work of people who had thoroughly misunderstood the peaceful nature of their religion. After all, if Muslims and Christians shared so much common ground, the burden of proof would necessarily fall on the shoulders of those few who maintained that Islam was not a religion of peace.

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