America’s failure to understand Islamic religion and culture led to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, American journalist Jonathon Lyons told an audience of about 30 yesterday at the Askwith Education Forum.

”There was this sense that [Sept. 11] came out of nowhere,” he said. “There was a sense that we were just innocently living our lives and the airplanes fell onto our heads out of the sky.”

Instead, Lyons said, the attacks of Sept. 11 and indeed all Muslim hostility stems from the United State’s attempt to undermine governments based on Islamic law.

He also said that the U.S. tends to reduce terrorism to an economic problem, blaming the attacks themselves on envy of the West’s riches.

“This is not a clash of civilizations, not a clash of Islam against the West,” he said. “The true cause [of the Sept. 11 attacks] is a search for an Islamic utopia. It is only when we get in the way of the Muslim path to heaven—that is by supporting repressive rulers deemed to be religiously illegitimate—is it we become the enemy.”

Lyons says that an understanding of a society very unlike our secular one is necessary for any long-term relationship with the Muslim world.

Lyons, at the time working for Reuters, said he and his wife, Geneive Abdo, were the first foreign correspondents in Iran following the Islamic Revolution.

“The only way to understand modern Iran is through the sort of prism of theological debate,” he said. “We found almost universally that educated young people want to hold on to their Islamic background. They want some sort of Islamic system, if not this Islamic system.”

Lyons talked about his personal experiences as a journalist dealing with the political authorities in Iran. The head of government in Iran only directly controls the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, and does not decide on war or peace or control the army and police force, as a head of state would in the West. Lyons said the ministry controls all media in Iran.

Lyons said that while he was in Iran, the Ministry used the press to convey important political messages.

Discussion within the Islamic seminaries, where ideological and policy debates that would determine the course of the country occurred, were disclosed to the public through the press, relegating the press to what Lyons referred to as “surrogate political parties.”

Lyons said he and his wife managed to avoid a crackdown on the media led by conservative forces in the government.

Their reports from Iran were broadcast back into the country through the Voice of America radio service, which Lyons said drew government criticism and eventually led to the pair’s dismissal from the country.

Lyon’s talk was based on a book, Answering Only to God: Faith and Freedom in Twenty-First Century Iran, co-written with his wife, who could not attend the talk because she was reporting in Cairo.

The book includes their observations on Iranian society and the story of their fall from official grace and eventual flight from the country.