Remembering 9/11, 25 years on

On 11 September 2001, I was starting the final year of my undergraduate degree. I was studying journalism at Carleton University in Ottawa, the national capital of Canada. I had no classes on Tuesdays, and my flatmate had already left for campus, so I had the place to myself. I listened to the news at 9:00, then turned the radio off as the cheerful, folksy presenter Shelagh Rogers began her national mid-morning programme. I fixed breakfast and read the newspaper.

Around 10:00, the phone rang. It was my flatmate’s father. “Is Jason there?”

“No, he’s in class this morning.”

“Well, could you tell him we’re okay?” The urgency in his voice was unmistakable.

I was confused. “Why would he worry you weren’t okay?”

“Haven’t you seen the news?” he asked. “Turn on the TV!”

We didn’t have a TV, but I put the radio back on. Shelagh Rogers now sounded distraught. Because of pre-recording to manage Canada’s multiple time zones, the first hour of her programme was made at 8:00 and therefore did not reflect the breaking news event that was unfolding. Rogers was shortly replaced in the presenter’s chair by her predecessor, Michael Enright, a senior journalist with deep experience in political and current affairs. With his sharp, authoritative voice, he narrated the images now indelibly etched on our memory: two planes had struck the north and south towers of the World Trade Center. One had just collapsed, and the other would shortly follow. A third plane attacked the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and the fourth crashed before its hijackers’ intentions could be seen through. This reporting carried on for hours. I was transfixed.

When I teach religion and the news to undergraduates, I reflect on these “where were you” narratives that are so often attached to 9/11. It’s not only a feature of journalistic or political reflections but also in scholarly literature: academics would preface their content analysis of news output or sociological exploration of community cohesion with a narrative of where they were when they heard of the attack. It was an exceptional global event, and it marked a hard pivot from the millennial optimism of the late 90s.

Certainly, it has contoured my professional life for the last 25 years. The flurry of reports, the analysis of how news was presented, and the worthy question about America’s empire made ample grist for my final year of journalism studies. In the national capital, citizens and officials alike grappled with the possibility of such an attack in Ottawa. Security increased around the House of Parliament, and the CBC, where I worked after graduating, was housed right next door.

In time, those fears diminished, but politically, one of the big stories we covered was Canada’s relationship with the United States, especially as it went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Domestically, we saw the switch from a long-standing Liberal government to a nascent Conservative one, rising from the ashes of fracture and rejuvenated by a religiously informed populist attitude. What place did religious motivations have – these were evangelical Christian ones – in the secular, pluralist institutions of the state?

It was an interesting question to me, as someone who worked to cultivate a beat on religious affairs. Because of this, when CBC Ottawa chose to build relations with communities that were underrepresented in its coverage and its audience, I was asked to get friendly with Muslims in the city. I got to know community leaders who were continually worried about being on the back foot and called upon to apologise for every global event classified as terrorism. When, after cutbacks following the financial crisis, I lost my job in journalism, I decided to turn the work I had been doing into an academic question. What is the relationship like between journalists and Muslims, and how do journalists, who often know little about Islam or Muslims, get informed? An MA in London turned into a PhD in Edinburgh, and since 2015, I’ve been working with the foremost centre for understanding Muslim in Britain from sociological perspective, here at Cardiff University.

In this work, 9/11 remains massively important. I’ve read scholars and journalists alike who diminish its importance in Britain, pointing instead to the London transit attacks of 7 July 2005. Even to frame this event as “our 9/11” is to show the significance of the earlier attack. But further, Muslims in Britain who appear in social research describe 9/11 as transformational.

This includes the negative aspects we can all imagine: heightened Islamophobia, demands to apologise, the discourse that Muslims are a threat. It also had positive effects, however. In my own research in Glasgow, Muslim community leaders spoke to me about the need to speak up and engage, to defend their communities and assert their right to exist. And this happened at a time when journalists, however ham-fisted, were more curious than ever.

That curiosity has had its own trajectory, as has our work of remembering and signifying. The ten-year anniversary was marked with a legion of scholarly treatments reflecting on lessons learned and how the world has changed. The twentieth anniversary was much more muted: the world was still crawling out of a global pandemic, and pictures of the past seemed less compelling than the problems of the present.

But on the doorstep of 25 years, three things stand out for me. From my own country, a new controversy over how to speak of the event. A Toronto newspaper reported on leaked internal communication from my former employer, the CBC. The corporation was reminding journalists of its style guide expectations around discussing terrorism: that the word was contentious and potentially harmful, and it needed to be used with attribution. This was reported, largely from combative ideological grounds, to suggest the CBC was soft on terrorism, unwilling to call it what it was. In response, one of its senior staff publicly walked back on the requirement for attribution when using the word “terrorism” specifically in relation to the events of 9/11.

It is a black eye for the public broadcaster, so often the punching bag of right-leaning private media groups. Media scholarship notes attribution as a long-held convention of serious journalism, though it can be used to provide cover for journalists who are ostensibly neutral, masking their opinion in the words of sources. But I’m glad that the CBC at least has a style guide and discusses its contents with its employees; my research on journalistic tools for understanding Islam and Muslims finds not every newsroom will have these, and it’s not clear how or whether they’re being used, nor how accurate the information they contain is.

Meanwhile, in New York, the setting for those initial attacks, a Muslim occupies the mayor’s office. That this is the case may be an optimistic mark of progress despite the last 25 years of vilification or pessimistic evidence of the need for further vigilance, depending on where you sit Islamophobically. But having Zohran Mamdani as mayor for this significant anniversary has led to the surprising and dismaying discourse in US media about whether he should attend the commemoration. Progress, then, is tempered, and those “just thinking about sensitivity” have once again made all Muslims responsible for the actions of a small few.

Finally, here in Britain, we have seen masked men block traffic and intimidate members of the public in Dover, Portsmouth, and even the headquarters of the Daily Mail in London. Their cause is ostensibly immigration and the protection of women, but it doesn’t take a PhD to see how these issues are encoded with Islamophobia. These men hide their faces behind masks, but the confidence of their public presence suggests that the threat against Muslims and the discourse of Muslims as a threat have not disappeared. Twenty-five years on, we are not merely remembering these social disruptions. We are still living through them.