A Bedouin state of mind: centuries ago, two great religious scholars understood the irrationality and evil that fuels today's terrorists. Perhaps better than we do.

ANNABA, ALGERIA--The port city of Annaba is on the coast of Algeria, near the eastern border with Tunisia. I set out for Annaba with a copy of St. Augustine's Confessions, hoping to understand something of Algeria's present--and of the Arab-Muslim world of which it is a part--by making a journey into its past.

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The first sight for any traveller approaching Annaba by land or sea is the Cathedral of St. Augustine on top of a hill overlooking the Mediterranean. It was built in the late 19th century by the French, above the ruins of the ancient Roman town still visible after some 2,000 years. Annaba was founded by Phoenicians in the first millennium before the Christian era, and around the third century before Christ it became the favourite city of Numidian rulers allied with Rome against the power of Carthage.

After the Punic wars, when Carthage was destroyed by Rome, Annaba became a Roman city named Hippo Regius and an early centre of Christianity in North Africa. Here Augustine served as bishop from 396 until his death in 430, around the time of the Vandals' siege of Hippo. Some three centuries later, Arabs arrived here, bringing Islam and their language to make North Africa since then a part of the Arab world.

Augustine is Algeria's most famous son, revered by the Catholic Church as one of her pre-eminent thinkers and theologians, yet he's barely remembered today in the land of his birth, where the population is almost entirely Muslim. He was born in 354 in Thagaste, now generally recognized as the town of Souk Ahras south of Annaba. He was canonized by Pope Boniface VIII in 1303 and his work, in particular The City of God, continues to provide inspired insights into the human condition afflicted by material desires and spiritual doubts. In Confessions, Augustine narrated his journey from Manichaean religion to Christian belief.

Almost exactly 1,000 years later, the famous Arab historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) was born a short distance away in Tunis, travelled in the region and beyond, and died in Cairo. I travelled to Annaba, meditating on the lives and writings of St. Augustine and Ibn Khaldun as two North Africans who witnessed the decline of the great powers of their respective times.

In Milan, and later in Hippo, St. Augustine reflected on the causes of Rome's eventual ruin, hastened by the corruption and debauchery of its rulers and invasions by barbarians from beyond the empire's frontiers. Similarly, Ibn Khaldun--his family having fled earlier into exile from Muslim Spain (al-Andalus) riddled with conflict between Arabs and Berbers--contemplated on the characteristics of peoples as they construct civilizations or bring about their collapse

Since the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, the Arab-Muslim world and Islam have dominated news. The western effort for a better understanding of Islam as faith and culture has been driven after 9/11 by the practical necessity of containing and defeating terrorism increasingly, if not entirely, associated with Muslims.

During the 1990s, Algeria--a case study of a society besieged by Arab-Muslim terrorists--was turned into a killing field by radical Islamists preaching jihad (holy war) as an article of faith, to be fought indiscriminately against those Muslims viewed as corrupt and non-believers in Islam. The Algerian government, dominated by the military, responded to Islamist jihad with a ruthless campaign to crush terrorism, which it did. But the scar of that savage decade's killings is visible everywhere in today's Algeria, and the recovery will be haltingly slow and painful.

But why did Algeria plunge into terrorism? The explanations contemporary experts seek are in the mix of socioeconomic and political factors. What is missing, or barely touched upon, is the nature of man who indulges in terrorism or justifies it. This is where the writings of St. Augustine and Ibn Khaldun shed greater light on terrorism causes than any recent writings of experts in the subject.

Man, St. Augustine wrote, "is a great abyss," and "the moods and attractions of his heart far outnumber the hairs of his head." If there is evil in him, it is because he is insufficient in goodness, for evil "does not exist of itself." "True holiness," or goodness, "is an interior disposition," an inward awakening to the reality of where God resides in the heart of man. A man awakened to his inner reality could do no evil--for instance, be a terrorist--since, filled with goodness, there would be no evil in him.

Islamists and Muslim terrorists have closed shut their "interior disposition." For them, belief is reduced to outward rituals of conformity, in pursuit of power over other men, rather than an awakening to the infinity inside of them, filled with God in whose image they have been made. Hence, they do evil for they are insufficient in goodness, despite their insistence on calling upon God according to their faith tradition.

Ibn Khaldun wrote of Islam as a civilizing force among Arabs of the desert, the Bedouins. But Bedouins are "a savage nation, fully accustomed to savagery and the things that cause it... Such a natural disposition is the negation and antithesis of civilization."

Bedouin, if we abstract from Ibn Khaldun's sociology, is a state of mind. Islamists, as modern-day Bedouins, are unable or unwilling to fathom the workings of modern civilization, to accept its rationality as a means of changing their situation, trapped in the vortex of pre-modern backwardness. They have chosen instead to make war upon it.

In Algeria, Islamists engaged themselves in a conflict of self-destruction. They were driven to this by their nature reflecting the abyss within themselves. Elsewhere, for instance in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan or the Palestinian territories, Muslim terrorists wage war on their opponents, indicating their incapacity to engage with the modern world rationally and in keeping with universal rules, rather than denying them by insisting on their savage disposition to oppose civilization.

From a great distance of time, the two North African sages speak to us wisely about understanding why men are seized with evil intent and do harm. Even as we must resist and defeat the evil of Muslim terrorism in our midst, we must remain reminded of St. Augustine's admonition to act with love of mankind and hatred of sins lest we are consumed by that against which we fight.