Islam, Civilizations and Terror

Abstract

The traumatic events of 9/11 were disturbing for many people in the West because the attacks seemed to come out of the blue and they seemed to know so little about their ‘enemy’ who was prepared to attack civilian lives and bring about such destruction. It was also disturbing to realize how intellectually unprepared people in the West were because our inherited intellectual traditions seemed to treat religion as a separate field, so that many of us had to come to terms with how little we had learnt about Islam and its place in the cultural history of the world.