It’s hard to write about something like the September 11th attacks without lapsing into cliché, and I know that what follows here is a small drop in a flood of such writing at the moment, a couple days out from the twentieth anniversary of the event. So I’ll start with the clichés, which are also expressions of something otherwise quite rare in American life, the experience of a shared moment in which reactions and to some extent later memories were, if not uniform, akin, shared in the sense of everyone knowing almost instantaneously and reacting in broadly similar ways.
I remember the morning of September 11th like it was yesterday. I was fifteen years old, a few weeks from my sixteenth birthday. It was a beautiful day in South Mississippi, warm but not as hot as it could well have been for later summer. At the time I was homeschooled, but I do not recall what I was studying that morning when we got word (a phone call? the internet? that detail too I do not recall) that something was happening, and we turned on the television and dialed in the news. Like so many others we watched, in what felt like suspended time, the planes crash into the towers, the smoke, dust, the collapses, as rumors and reports of additional events came in and out of view. Of course at first it was not totally clear who was responsible, but it was pretty clear that something of historical significance had flipped. The world, or our world as Americans at least, had changed, and not in a good way. My life would not be the same, though I could hardly know that at the time, and the long effects of September 11th would take years to manifest in my life as in the world at large.
I remember, too, a breaking in of normality, of the world as it had existed hours before; I stepped outside to meet the mailman at our door who was delivering a package, an Irish whistle I had ordered a few weeks before. I remember briefly talking before he continued on his route about what was happening and our sense of shock and disbelief. I don’t think I opened the box that day, but of course in time I did, and every time I picked that instrument up my mind went back to that day in September.
It’s true that to this point we can speak of a shared experience for all Americans: the fear, horror, confusion, the feeling of a sudden and previously unknown vulnerability, a new seriousness to political and social life. The halcyon years of the nineties- which for me personally as for America as a whole really were quite wonderful, an era of relative peace and contentment- were decidedly over. We were at war, though the clarity that seemed expressed in that phrase would fade and collapse in the years to come, as the ‘we’ disintegrated and the war become distant and forgotten for most Americans, even as it heated up into cataclysm in lands far from our shores.
Ironically, if for many Americans life did not really change due to September 11th, at least not spectacularly and in the short-term (though a strong case could be made that the last half decade or so, in which all our lives have indeed changed, is unimaginable without the long trajectory of 9/11), as we returned to ‘normality,’ the President urging us to shop, revive the economy, and defeat the terrorists, the global repurcussions of 9/11 would begin to seep into my life. Some of it was more a matter of a general atmosphere: even as the dust was still settling public discourse turned to Islam and Muslims and the Middle East, and generally not in a good way, with some locally very ugly results. It was hard, as a teenager and then college student with an interest in becoming a historian, to ignore that discourse and not want to know more for himself. I was already deeply immersed in medieval European history (among other subjects), and in the years immediately after 9/11 began reading in Islamic history as well, helped by the fact that even before starting college I had access to a university library by means of my father, who at the time was a master’s student in history.
From there my story is one marked by what we in history like to call contingency, the often random concurrence of events that end up shaping individual and collective histories in otherwise unpredictable ways. My exposure to Islamic history and lived Islam was rather random: one of the first academic books I read, I now only vaguely recall, was a history of Zaydi Islam, which the library just happened to have and which I chanced upon and thought interesting. My first experience of Islam as a lived religion came in, of all places, Yunnan Province, China, in 2005; I was quite surprised to see Arabic calligraphy and pictures of the Ka’ba on bakeries and restaurants. My hotel room for a night in Kunming overlooked the old Muslim quarter, then in the process of being demolished in the name of progress or national unity or something; I knew a bit about its history by then and the proud legacy of Yunnan’s Muslims and felt a bitter sadness (it is not coincidental that the summer and fall of 2005 saw a huge shift in my political inclinations, but that is another story). It was not long thereafter that I discovered- again through a basically happenstance book discovery, a volume on Ibn ‘Arabī- sufism, and a whole vast landscape began to open up to and entice me intellectually and emotionally. By the end of my undergraduate education I had decided I wanted to study Islamic history, and as such needed to learn Arabic, so I saved up money, lived at home for the rest of the year, then left for Morocco in Feburary of 2008. The rest is history, both literally and in terms of that to which my adult life since then has been professionally devoted.
But the above is only part of the story. For if the kind of serendipiteous discovery and random contingency that has no doubt driven many a historian to his or her field played no small role, so did the escalating effects of September 11th, and the presence of that changed world in my own life. Like, to our collective and personal shame, nearly all other Americans in the immediate aftermath of the attack I was enthusiastic and eager for justice to be done; I cheered the fall of the Taliban and the pursuit of al'-Qa’ida. I was less certain about the subsequent invasion of Iraq- even then it was pretty obvious Saddam Hussein had nothing substantial to do with 9/11, but I was not unhappy to see his regime fall. But whatever enthusiasism and support I had quickly turned to exploratory and then vigorous antiwar sentiment and action. I followed the news out of Iraq and Afghanistan and other fronts in the ‘global war on terror’ closely; I decked out my car and my laptop and my dorm room with antiwar slogans, to be honest I made it part of my identity (in a particularly strange turn of my mind I wore an Amish-style beard for a while as a symbol, lost on virtually everyone, of my antiwar position!).
And then the war in Iraq became a part of my own family. My father had been in the National Guard since from before the First Gulf War, but had avoided being deployed in that conflict by its great brevity. He did not avoid the second. As a chaplain in the Air National Guard (having transferred some time before) he was deployed in 2007 to staff a hospital on Balad Air Force Base, where he worked in a bedside capacity in wards filled with the often horrifically wounded coming in from the battlefields just beyond the base’s perimeter. While not on the front-line, the base regularly took mortar fire. It is a strange and perverse thing to reach young adulthood and find yourself worry that your father is going to die in war. To make a long story short, the fall fo 2007 was perhaps the darkest period of my life thus far- I was also teaching as a substitute teacher in city and rural schools in and around Laurel, Mississippi, while working nights at a skating rink (which functioned as a cheap equivalent day-care at which parents would drop their children and expect us to tend to them, you can solve for the rest) and struggled with the tragedy in front of me on a regular basis, with the war in Iraq sounding in my ears from afar.
By the time I arrived in Morocco in the late winter of 2008 my father had returned home safe if not entirely sound (can anyone return from war truly sound?) but America’s wars continued, and they weighed on me more and more, I felt- rightly or wrongly or some combination- responsible, I felt a debt to someone, to the Islamic world perhaps, and I struggled to find a way to fulfill it. Devoting my life to the history of this part of the world that for so many of my countrymen was a source of menance and a target for ‘smart’ bombs seemed like some kind of reperation, almost an act of repentance, though, happily, I really enjoyed Islamic history and found myself remarkably at home in an majority-Muslim society. There was a striking and troubling juxtaposition between the welcome and kindness I found among the people of Morocco from the streets of Fes to little huddled settlements high in the Atlas with the ongoing carnage in Iraq, carnage caused by my country, by the government to which I paid my taxes and for which my own family members had fought. One day after Arabic class I got on the computer in the small computer lab and read the news- I do not remember the particulars any more but there had been an accidental airstrike somewhere in Iraq, with scores and scores of civilian casualties, many of them women and children. Reading the account and looking at the pictures, something inside me just broke. I shut the machine outside and, with hot tears welling up in my eyes, rushed outside and just began walking down the street towards the old city. A group of women in flowing robes, their hair wrapped in hijabs, passed by me and smiled and all I could think about were the torn and mangled bodies of the women in Iraq who looked so much like these women in front of me, it was just too much, and I simply broke down crying.
Of course my desire to study Islamic history, and my immersion in the cultures and arts and religious lives of the wider Islamicate world, has not and is not entirely or even primarily driven by such reactions to the long war on terror- but it is inseperable from that context. Not only have I long felt- justified or not, if such things can even be parsed- that sense of responsibility, of wanting to challenge the prevailing discourse (be it violently polemically or simplistic and colorlessly blasé), my more economic calculations in terms of professional life have been shaped by 9/11 and its aftermath. Simply put, there was and still is to some degree a job market for academics in my field in no small part because of 9/11 and its aftermath, American institutions suddenly discovering a need to understand Islamic history and culture, American funding institutions deciding this was in vital national interest. I am a beneficiary of that context, which only further complicates my relationship with the field and with Islam and the Islamicate world.
There is more that I need to talk about in this vein- for instance, at the same time that I was diving into the study of Islamic history I was in the process of leaving Protestant Christianity for Orthodox Christianity, even as over the years Islam as a historical and a lived religion has shaped my own spiritual life and practice in various ways, which it seems should create more tension than I find has in fact been the case. But the story of how that has happened and where I find myself today can wait for now.
I’ve occasionally speculated as to what my life would have looked like if those al-Qa’ida operatives had never hijacked those airplanes, or if they’d all crashed into the countryside like Flight 93, and the War on Terror had never happened, the question of ‘Islam and the West’ would have never soared into public prominence, the invasion of Iraq never happened, universities and foundations and the like never caring any more for the study of Islam and the Middle East than they had before. A mere two days after 9/11 I was up in Noxubee County, Mississippi, exploring bluff forest and prairie glades with the state botanist and a handful of other botanically-inclined folks, guiding them to some populations of rare plants I had recently discovered. I was seriously thinking about going into the sciences, probably botany, and as you might gather just from the above was taking concrete steps towards such a career, even before starting college. Perhaps I would now be a botanist somewhere, with all the events and relationships of the last decade and a half of my life never having taken place, driven as so many of them were by my commitment to becoming and working as a historian of Islam. As such in a very real way I owe the person I have become and the life I have led to that day in September and the terrible reactions and aftermath that marked the years to come- such are the permutations of history, the strange and terrible stuff out of which we end up finding and fashioning our lives. Whatever I have done and may do in my life in the future will never make up for the lives lost and destroyed and maimed over the last twenty years, I cannot refashion or fix that history, but I can, must, acknowledge its role in shaping me, in making me what I am and in giving me what I now have, and strive to create understanding and peace and respect in the world that has emerged from those twenty years.