Epilogue. 191tatives of the faith. He was careful to have a Muslim stand-
ing beside him at the ceremony of mourning in Washington
National Cathedral and visited mosques to show his support
for American Muslims. This was a wholly new and extremely
welcome development. Nothing similar had happened at the
time of the Salman Rushdie crisis or during the Desert Storm
campaign against Saddam Hussein. It was also heartening to
see Americans descending upon the bookstores, reading every-
thing they could find about Islam, and struggling to under-
stand the Muslim faith, even though they were reeling in
horror from this terrorist attack.
It has never been more important for Western people to
acquire a just appreciation and understanding of Islam. The
world changed on September 11. We now realize that we in
the privileged Western countries can no longer assume that
events in the rest of the world do not concern us. What hap-
pens in Gaza, Iraq, or Afghanistan today is likely to have
repercussions in New York, Washington, or London tomor-
row, and small groups will soon have the capacity to commit
acts of mass destruction that were previously only possible
for powerful nation states. In the campaign against terror on
which the United States has now embarked, accurate intelli-
gence and information are vital. To cultivate a distorted
image of Islam, to view it as inherently the enemy of democ-
racy and decent values, and to revert to the bigoted views of
the medieval Crusaders would be a catastrophe. Not only will
such an approach antagonize the 1.2 billion Muslims with
whom we share the world, but it will also violate the disinter-
ested love of truth and the respect for the sacred rights of
others that characterize both Islam and Western society at
their best.