Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

276 t REFLECTIONS AFTER A BREAKFAST
world that no longer seems willing to accept religion as a just cause
of war or any other form of violence.
This book has proposed no solutions because it has identified no
problems. It has attempted rather to trace for Jews and Christians
the spiritual and political bloodlines of Islam, working from etiology
rather than behavior. It is an odd enterprise perhaps for someone
who sat at his own breakfast table and watched in horrified
disbelief the destruction by Muslim fanatics of part of the life and
fabric of New York City. My chief reaction on that terrible day
was one of profound sadness at the loss to me personally and to
the noble enterprise that is America, but sadness too at the sure
knowledge of the hate and misunderstanding that prompted the
act and the equal portion of each that would surely follow in its
wake.
I have spent half of my professional life trying to explain the
hate and unravel the misunderstanding that pervades religious history
and the other half attempting to describe the joy and sublimity
that has often accompanied the worship of God. I have done it
the same way I have tried to do it here, by laying bare both the
causes of hate and the reasons for the misunderstanding. It still
seems to me the only worthwhile way of coming to terms with
both the evil and the good that humans do in the name of God.