Looking Back on the 9/11 Decades(3) Guest Post

Muslims Under Siege

There is no single homogeneous ‘Muslim community’, but all Muslim communities were transformed by 9/11 and by the ‘wars on terror’ that followed, and this transformation has not always been recognised or understood. Overnight all Muslim communities in the Western world became suspect communities, forced to defend themselves and distance themselves from crimes they had nothing to do with.

At times Muslims were subject to a 21st century ‘inquisitorial gaze’, in which any expression of ‘political Islam’ - even opposition to Western wars or the defence of the civil and legal rights of a Muslims detained in Guantanamo Bay - could be construed as complicity with terrorism. Even if Muslims were not overtly ‘political’ or not political at all, their mere presence in Europe or the United States was often depicted by a range of governments and anti-Muslim writers as an ‘enemy within’ and a cultural/religious threat.

And yet throughout these years Muslims across the world now found themselves forced to engage in new forms of political activism to defend themselves against the panoply of extra-judicial special measures introduced by states waging a nebulous global ‘war against terror’.

What did this feel like? What does it feel like now? I’m pleased to publish this powerful guest post from the writer and journalist Amandla Thomas-Johnson. Amandla has reported from a dozen countries, including Chile, Senegal and Trinidad and Tobago. He has worked for Middle East Eye, BBC, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, Aljazeera, and was a trainee at Channel 4 Dispatches. He is the author of Becoming Kwame Ture, a short text about the activist also known as Stokely Carmichael and is currently a PhD student at Cornell University's department of Literatures in English.

These are his reflections on the ‘day that changed the world’ and the events that followed.

No Respite

I felt little respite when in the wake of 9/11 tabloid front pages shifted their focus from Black men in hoodies to brown men with beards; earlier that year I had taken my shahadah and become a Muslim. I struggle to imagine what sort of person I would now be had the towers not fallen. My friends, my politics, my choice of profession, where I travel, what I say and to whom, what I write and for whom, my best hopes and my worst fears, were all shaped by the events of September 11th 2001.

Some part of me just thinks that my life over the last twenty years has just been a whole big waste of time. Just because of the West's imperial impulses, with its gluttonous oil companies and bloodthirsty arms manufacturers, we have been forced to expend time and energy on trying to shut Guantanamo, ban Prevent, overturn the Muslim ban, seek redress for rendition and torture, battle McCarthyite-like smears, seethe at Douglas Murray, as well as campaign against further military interventions - and risk getting criminalised for doing so.

I'm not sure whether those of us who are Muslim in the West quite understand how the so-called war on terror has affected us collectively. There was a time, believe it or not, when Muslims were at the forefront of broad coalitions against global injustices, had a vision of the greater good.

What does it mean now that so many of our leaders on both sides of the Atlantic - from across the doctrinal spectrum, Black, white, Arab, South Asian - having backed such a full retreat into the private sphere, find rare agreement on the need to oppose activism?

Alarmist schoolboy screeds on the ills of Marxism, critical race theory and feminism seem to be the stuff of collective trauma, of an imagination stifled and contained, limited to the radical wing of the Republican party convention, the backbenches of the Tory party conference.

Without a doubt, over the last twenty years, we've been heavily disciplined, beaten down, chastened. It is hard to tell whether we know this and yet still choose to tread an increasingly narrow path or if we are totally lost and do not know where we are heading.

As we ask bold questions of the powers that be, there are some urgent ones we need to ask ourselves: How has it come to this? How we have become so domesticated?