On this, the seventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a glance back at a 2006 essay by Fr. James V. Schall, S.J.:
Of course, we know, in another meaning of the word "cause," that the World Trade Centers were destroyed because passenger planes, hijacked by young Muslim men who shrewdly prepared themselves just for that purpose, rammed planes into the buildings. We know the "physics," as it were, of what happens to such buildings when planes explode against their sides. We are not sure that these men or their instigators were not themselves clever enough at building mechanics to have intended precisely the astonishing result they achieved. In fact, the plot's stunning success may have surprised even them. In any case, we know that many people in Muslim cities cheered the event as a "success." As far as I know, we have received no "apology" from those who claim responsibility. They did not warn their intended victims. They were not "saddened" by their success, but content with it. Nor did anyone of them offer "reparations" for the damage they caused. This implies that, in their own minds, what they did was not unjust but an act of virtue. The pilots and their henchmen were, in their own estimation, "martyrs," not "killers."
I argued from the very beginning that the attacks had already begun in the previous two decades with various bombings of ships, embassies, and aircraft in other places throughout the world, and that the driving motivation behind them was not secular, nor political, but religious. What was going on came from a theological understanding of Muslim purpose in the world. Even those Muslims, however few or many they be, who did not think that such means were the wisest ones to use, none the less, understood the legitimacy of the purpose behind them.
I further argued that, by not acknowledging this motivation, we, in a sense, did not do justice to what was going on; we did not, that is, do justice to the men who conceived and carried out the destructive plan. We thus wandered off into fields of explanation that were elaborate, sophisticated, "scientific," and often self-serving, but which did not correspond to what we were seeing, to what these men said of themselves. Basically, it seemed to me that by calling this a war on "terrorism" a war against "fanatics" or "madmen," we, in a real way, demeaned both our enemies and ourselves. We did not want to look in the eye of the real storm.
If, on the other hand, we want to call this a "war of civilization," well and good, provided that we realize, following Christopher Dawson, that civilizations are themselves expressions of religions, or pseudo-religions we now call "ideologies." No civilization in the history of mankind is less amenable to a purely secular explanation of what it does than Islam. Our efforts to explain this war in terms of Western philosophy or science, however elaborate, fail to get at the central issue, the belief that everyone ought to be Muslim, that this is the will of Allah on earth, that there can be no long-term rest until this submission is brought about and "peace" ensues. This motive, invisible to "science," is quite visible to those who see it as an abiding mission over time, over centuries. What most handicaps us is an idea that such a purpose cannot abide over time and take various differing forms of reincarnation, including one in our own day.
Read "9/11 Revisited" (Sept. 8, 2006). Also:
Related IgnatiusInsight.com Links/Articles:
• Tom Burnett: A Hero on Flight 93 | An interview with Deena Burnett, author of Fighting Back (Sept. 2006)
• On the Term "Islamo-Fascism" | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. (Aug. 2006)
• Spartans, Traitors, and Terrorists | Dr. Jose Yulo (Aug. 2006)
• Plato's Ring in the Sudan: How Freedom Begets Isolation of the Soul | Dr. Jose Yulo (May 2006)
• Martyrs and Suicide Bombers | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. (Aug. 2005)
• The One War, The Real War | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. (July 2005)
• Wars Without Violence? | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. (July 2005)
• The Echo of Melos: How Ancient Honor Unmasks Islamic Terror | Dr. Jose Yulo (Dec. 2005)
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