The events of September 11 have by now acquired totemic value. As indeed they should. But what do they signify? This article attempts to answer that question from the point of a view of a Pakistani, living in the US, looking without (at the US) and looking within (at Pakistan).

Looking Without

At the most elemental level, September 11, 2001 signifies the largest act of terrorism ever committed (largest in terms of loss of human life and largest measured in financial cost). It means the horrible tragic loss of perhaps 7,000 innocent lives and the disruption and discomfort, in means large and small, of literally hundreds of thousand of others.

At the next level of abstraction September 11, 2001 is cast as an attack on America. An attack by an implacable enemy who has lashed out at what America represents. As President Bush told Congress, "They hate what we see right here in this chamber - a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms - our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." Or, felt Kurt Anderson in Time magazine, "New York was targeted with such staggering precision and viciousness because the city, more than any other, actually does live up to the demonic Taliban caricature. We are the bin Ladenites’ worst nightmare. We are rich. We swagger. We enjoy ourselves."

Perhaps those were indeed the reasons.

Or perhaps, there was some context to these events beyond just blind hatred of all that is good and great and joyful. As the shock and horror of Sep 11 recedes, there is an increasing awareness within the US of the need for context. This is put forth most commonly in the question, "Why do they hate us?" The responses usually trace some generalized Islamic/Arab sense of grievance at a loss of power and influence in the world, some sense of dismay at an increasingly secular world and a dollop of the usual suspects, Israel and Iraq, thrown in for good measure. Underlying this line of reasoning is an assumption of the US as a largely passive interlocutor acting mostly to promote goodwill and harmony amongst nations.

Reality, of course, begs to differ. As Edward Said, puts it so eloquently, "Anti-Americanism in this context is not based on a hatred of modernity or technology envy. It is based on a narrative of concrete interventions, specific depredations and, in the cases of the Iraqi people's suffering under U.S.- imposed sanctions and U.S. support for the 34-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, cruel and inhumane policies administered with a stony coldness”.

The record is clear. There are at least three major sins that the US continues to commit which underlie the antipathy with which the US is regarded in much of the Muslim world. In approximate order of importance;

a) the ongoing US support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine (soon to become the longest in modern history exceeding Japan’s occupation of Korea between 1910 and 1945). This is coupled with the absolutely one-sided allocation of blame in the failure of peace negotiations (the standard US narrative of “historic” and “unprecedented” concessions by Israel is convincingly demolished in an article in the New York Review of Books dated Aug 9 2001).

b) the historically unprecedented severity of sanctions against Iraq which by most credible estimates continue to result in more than 5,000 lives lost each month due to unnecessary economic deprivation. Denis Halliday, the former UN Humanitarian Coordinators for Iraq, has estimated more than 500,000 children have died as a direct result of the sanctions. Indeed as Kevin Reinhart, Professor of Religion at Dartmouth, asked in Time magazine, “Would we tolerate this kind of boycott, the starving of Czechs for example? No. We’ve done some specific things that are perceived as reflecting either an indifference to or a hostility to Muslims”.

c) the continued support for a variety of unpleasant regimes in the Islamic world including Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Clearly none of the above could ever even remotely merit an act of such terror as Sep 11. But the act itself must be recognized as a link in a chain. As the final snapping back of a serpent that has long been feeding on the discontent and even rage that a careless unilateralist superpower generates as just so much collateral damage. The irony is completed in that the serpent was born of US money and training in those long-ago days of the Cold War when the affectionately termed “muj” battled a proxy war against the Evil Empire. As usual, Shakespeare had it all figured out:


“that we but teach

Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return

To plague the inventor: this even-handed justice

Commends the ingredients of our poison'd chalice

To our own lips” [Macbeth, I:7]


So how to let go the poisoned chalice? Sep 11 represents a historic opportunity for America. This is the time to recognize the dreadful blowback its policies have engendered. If the US could reconcile itself to a creeping democratization in South America (after historically supporting any and all tin-pot dictators), can not the same be done in the Islamic World? Can’t the US push Eygpt, recipient of close to $3 billion in aid annually, towards less a Stalinist version of democracy? Can’t the Saudis be told to clean their act up? All of these questions pre-Sep 11 would appear painfully naïve. And yet, today, the appeal is not to a moral side of US policy making (there is none), but to the constant and steadfast realpolitik side. For the calculus has changed. The current way of doings things has incurred costs that were inconceivable just a couple of weeks ago. Rationality and pragmatism demand that while the terrorists behind Sep 11 must be sought out and punished, a fundamental alliance of the US with the interests of the people of the Islamic world (and not the corrupt and morally bankrupt regimes) is the supreme US national interest as well. The challenge will be one of imagination: will the US leadership have the vision to move beyond the strictures of fifty years of policy and recognize their own vital interests?

Looking Within

That was easy. Looking within ...

Clearly September 11, 2001 is no less momentous for Pakistan (and I think much of what follows is true for the broader Islamic world as well). There seem to three broad sets of responses from Pakistanis to September 11, 2001:

a) the religious-fundamentalist: The Taliban and Afghanistan is our great hope in establishing Sharia. An attack on the Taliban is part of a broad conspiracy (probably involving the Jews) to first defame and then attack Islam. The death of 5,000+ Americans possibly signifies the imminent arrival of Imam Mehdi and the final stage of world conflict.

To deconstruct this is simple and tedious but necessary. The Taliban represent nothing. Afghanistan has been bombed back into a pre-industrial society. Even if you believe that the Taliban have correctly established Sharia, they constitute no example for anyone since they represent a singular instance of a Rip van Winkle like state.

Of course the notion that the Taliban are Islam’s great shining hope is brutally demolished by their record in exporting heroin (substantially to feed the addicts in their brotherly Muslim country of Pakistan). [The Taliban also only stopped growing heroin when they were paid off to do so by the UN and not by any internal moral suasion as one might have hoped]. Then there is associated problem that almost no one actually wants to live under the Taliban (no girls going to school and so on). This is further compounded by the simple fact that almost all putative supporters of the Taliban had been noticeably lacking in their support pre-Sep 11 (after all, the Taliban were and continue to be in the grip of a severe food crisis). Hence, we see the support for the Taliban as yet more of what the Islamic world specializes in: what Winston Churchill rather brutally called, “the rage of impotent sheep”.

As for the imminent arrival of Imam Mehdi, clearly I have no ability to assess this one way or the other. But one thought does stand out: Is the death of 5,000 Americans really such an awe-inspiring event that we are moved to recall such end-of-the-world predictions? Was not the massacre of 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica of any consequence? Was the death of the 25,000 Bangladeshis we killed in the week of March 25, 1971 not a portent of any importance? Was the death of perhaps 500,000 Pakistanis in August 1947 so trivial? It is more than a little depressing to ponder how much we value the lives of American citizens (which should be valued) and how we devalue of our existence.

b) the secular: religion is the opium of the masses. We told you so. This is all because of the mullahs. We have to fix them somehow. Why can’t we all just get along?

A point of view which is just as absurd as the religious-fundamentalist. That particular philosopher is, of course, himself mucking about in the “rubbish heap of history”. More fundamentally, the secular view suffers from two basic problems:

firstly, religion is part of our culture, part of our identity. To blithely set it aside as of only personal and private consequence is to ignore the day-to-day reality that religion holds for us. Before the gentle (or not so) reader asks who is this us, let us remember that for the very vast majority of Pakistanis (including myself) religion is indeed a core part of our identity.

secondly, secularist proscriptions revolve around “fixing” the mullahs and presumably convincing all those left behind of the truth and glory of this new creed. Hence they are the complete mirror image of the mullahs own recommendations. Yet another set of “leaders” come to foist their own view of religion (spiritual or secular) to lead us towards redemption.

c)the pragmatic: the Pervez Musharraf school of thought. We have to do what Uncle wants us to. But while we are at it, lets try and milk the situation for all that we can.

Not a bad approach. Of course, we can also view this as 1981 redux when an earlier Republican Administration sought to reward us for being so steadfast in their cause. The resulting rewards led to a nice party through the 80s while it lasted. The cleanup, at an economic, and at a societal level kept us occupied through much of the 90s. So, do we then start another decade long cycle of American fed boom to be followed by an economic contraction borne of the inevitable American infidelity?

Or is this a more fundamental opportunity? To dramatically rethink the core question that haunts this dialectic: Who are we as a nation and how do we choose to conduct ourselves?

I believe this a time for us to search for a synthesis that avoids both the recidivist trap of the fundamentalists who would like nothing better than to turn back the clock a millennium or so as well as the simple minded secular-is-better mantra. This would be a synthesis that embraces our culture and religion and yet engages with and ultimately tames modernity to our own ends. This will not be created in any grand vision from a few men of wisdom. Rather our actions, in living and creating a vibrant cultural and spiritual life fully existing in here and the now, will be the bedrock of this approach.

In some ways, September 11 forces us to relive a debate that occurred almost 150 years ago. Back in 1857, the "War of Independence," a final spasm of revolt exposed how pitiful we were faced with the modernity of that era. Again we faced two seemingly simple choices: A complete rejection of everything British or a complete surrender to its value and culture. Somehow, the Aligarh movement managed to create a synthetic approach that lived in the modernity and spoke its language but was deeply immersed in our cultural and religious heritage. Pakistan, today, exists partly because of Aligarh and what it wrought. The time has come to reclaim that glory.