ABSTRACT
When Muslim al Qaeda terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center and attacked the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the United States already was sharply divided politically. The highly partisan and rhetorically charged political scene following the election compounded the problem of moral differences among religious groups. Americans before 9/11 were largely unfamiliar with Islam, and what passed for knowledge about Islam typically was inaccurate and partial. One measure of the extreme partisanship that emerged after 9/11 was the fact that even as the Religious Right was losing in its campaigns against abortion, homosexuality, and evolutionary theory, and losing the attention of young persons. They were digging in more determinedly in an attempt to legislatively enact their conservative policies and defends them in courts. A decade after 9/11, anti-Muslim political and religious rhetoric began to focus on Sharia—the name given to Muslim juridical traditions—as a looming problem for the nation.
