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At 8:49 a.m. on September 11, 2001, CNN host Carol Lin inserted an urgent news item in the morning news. The screen showed a frightening picture: the top floor of a skyscraper was shrouded in fire and smoke. Lin told the audience that it was an accident that happened three minutes ago, "What you see is obviously a very disturbing scene. That's the World Trade Tower, and we received an unconfirmed report this morning that a plane crashed into a tower at the World Trade Center. The CNN Center has just begun to cover the incident, and we are in the process of connecting sources to confirm exactly what happened. But it's clear that a devastating incident is taking place on Manhattan's South Island. ”
Was this an accident caused by the pilot's disorientation or inexperience or was it deliberate? Both witnesses at the scene and global viewers in front of the television set were speculating. Some older Americans may recall the precedent of July 28, 1945, when a B-25 bomber lost in the morning fog crashed into the Empire State Building, killing three crew members and 11 others.
Ten minutes later, another large passenger plane flew low and fast toward the tower next to the burning north tower in the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center; at 9:03, the plane, code-named United Airlines Flight 175, crashed into the between the 77th and 85th floors of the South Tower of the World Trade Center at a speed of 540-587 miles per hour. Admittedly, it was a terrorist attack, and surprisingly, it still wasn't over — at 9:37, American Flight 77 crashed into the first and second floors of the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia; at 10:03, United Airlines Flight 93 crashed into a clearing near the town of Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
According to Mitchell Zuckoff, a former Boston Globe reporter, in addition to 19 hijackers, a total of 2,977 people were killed in four planes, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Among the victims were 1462 in the North Tower, 630 in the South Tower, 421 New York emergency responders, 246 passengers and crew members on board the plane, and 125 Pentagon-related personnel. About 6,000 more were injured, some of whom will never recover. Thousands more, mostly emergency responders and investigators, suffer from respiratory, psychological and other medical conditions. Authorities estimate that by the 20th anniversary of 9/11, more people will die from diseases related to the World Trade Center bombings than from terrorist attacks.
<h3>01 The Struggle of Civilizations: The Fundamental Contradiction Between the Christian Western World and the Islamic Eastern World</h3>
Many observers later found that in the face of the most serious terrorist attack in the history of the United States, the United States authorities seriously lacked anticipation and preparation — terrorist acts that coordinated with each other to hijack multiple aircraft had never occurred in the United States before, and no one had such a concept. In fact, the whole country was immersed in prosperity and security at that time. As Zukov writes in the introduction to Fall and Rebirth: The Story of 9/11:
"In the summer of 2001, not every American was confident in the state of the country, but many enjoyed or took for granted the privilege of living in the last superpower of the early 2000s. They enjoyed the longest uninterrupted economic boom in American history, and America's cultural, political, and commercial interests spread to the most distant corners of the world and seemed destined to continue endlessly... A Gallup poll of September 10, 2001, showed that less than 1 percent of Americans believe terrorism is America's number one hidden danger. ”
The threat came from a cave in Afghanistan inhabited by a wealthy Saudi businessman named Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda group. On February 23, 1998, Al-Qaida issued a Islamic decree declaring war on the United States and all U.S. citizens, regardless of where they or their interests may be. Bin Laden once said of the World Trade Center, "These two stunning, symbolic towers are a testament to freedom, human rights and humanity. What he wants to do is to hijack the Petronas Twin Towers and give a symbolic blow to the United States and the postwar global order it represents. In an interview with Al Jazeera correspondent Tessier Aruni in October 2001, bin Laden said, "This battle is not between al-Qaida and the United States, but between Muslims and crusaders around the world." ”
Lawrence Wright, an American writer and author of Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Tower of Doom: Al-Qaida and the 9/11 Road," notes that the message from these remarks is similar to that of american political scientist Samuel Wright. The "clash of civilizations" proposed by Samuel P. Huntington coincides with the clash of civilizations, in bin Laden's view, the clash of civilizations, more specifically between the Christian West and the Islamic East, that has lasted for millennia. In exploring the causes of the outrageous hatred behind 9/11, many researchers have looked to history for answers. According to Anthony Pagden, a professor of political science and history at UCLA, it all begins with the division of reality and thought between the West and the East 2,500 years ago, when "al-Qaida and the West's war is nothing more than the latest manifestation of a protracted confrontation between East and West." ”
In 490 BC, the Persian king Darius I launched an all-out attack on Europe, a war known in history as the "Persian War" that was the first attempt by an Asian power to conquer all of Europe. In documenting and explaining the war, Herodotus may have pointed out for the first time that there were different worldviews between Europeans and Asians—the former believing in democracy and the latter pursuing a monarchy. History tells us that the Greeks passed on their political traditions to the Romans, who in turn gave it as a legacy to the Renaissance and subsequent modern Europe; at the same time, the three major monotheistic religions continued to expand their influence in Eurasia, and the West converted to Christianity, forming the Christian Western world, and constantly strife with the Islamic Eastern world, vying for the right to define and rule the world.
It is worth noting that the Islamic world has had a historical moment of superiority. The Abbasid dynasty created a period of Islamic cultural prosperity in the 9th–11th centuries, which began with the reign of three caliphs – Al-Mansur (reigned 754–775), Harun Rashid (reigned 786–809), and Mamun (reigned 813–833). Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid dynasty, soon developed from nothing to a world center of astonishing wealth and international status, attracting people from all corners of the known world. During this time, the Islamic world translated a large number of valuable foreign manuscripts (Mamun was said to have had a dream about Aristotle, so he sent emissaries to Constantinople to search for Greek manuscripts and established a translation center in Baghdad), making a prominent contribution to the inheritance and development of science and technology.
The British intellectual historian Peter Watson recorded the remarkable achievements of the Islamic world during this period in his book The History of Ideas: From Fire to Freud, such as the translation of an Indian mathematical work into Arabic at the direction of Mansour, and Arabic numerals gradually becoming a universal mathematical symbol; the first hospital in the modern sense was founded by Rashid, the medieval Muslim hospital advanced to set up isolation wards for infectious diseases, and the concept of public health was born during this period Two great Muslim physicians, Rachi and Ibn Sina, compiled the Medical Integration and the Code of Medicine, respectively, which for a long time replaced Galen's work as the basic textbook of the European Medical School.
However, the culture created by Islamic society that was in every way superior to that of contemporary Europe did not survive. Pagordon cites the French historian Ernest Renant as pointing out that the divergence between Islam and Christendom is not due to some essential difference in their beliefs, but rather that "Islam makes the spiritual and real worlds an inseparable unity" and prevents Muslims from accepting new knowledge and new perspectives that may conflict with their beliefs. In Contrast, in Europe, after a long and painful religious war, the Renaissance, the Great Geographical Discoveries, and the Scientific and Philosophical Revolution of the 17th Century, the authority of Christian religion continued to decline, and the process of secularization began. Europeans came to believe that all human affairs could only be understood from a human perspective. Pagordon argues that this not only brought the secular European Western world and the Islamic Eastern world from Egypt to India to a fork in history, but also exacerbated the fundamental contradiction between the two that continues to this day:
Both sides argue that their own values, and more fundamentally, their own understanding of the laws of the universe, apply to all of humanity. However, Westerners believe that the understanding of the universe is obtained by human beings through reason, without any direct help from any god, while Muslims believe that the only universal truth, and at the same time the only truth, comes from the way of Allah. ”
By the late 18th century, there was an irreversible imbalance in the balance of power between East and West – the Treaty of Kalovitz between Russia and the Ottoman Empire in 1696 deprived the Ottomans of their territory in Eastern Europe; in 1718, another treaty of humiliation restored the borders of Hungary and Croatia to the state they had been in before they were conquered by Suleiman the Magnificent; in 1774, the Ottoman Empire was again forced to seek peace with Tsarist Russia and sign the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kenalgy... The Islamic world had to start asking itself the reason for the failure. The answer is twofold: the prevailing strengths of the victorious side and the inherent weaknesses of the losing side, which are often reduced to social corruption or moral depravity, and the solution is either to purify society or to literally carry out God's will in order to appease angry gods.
Pagordon found that since the late 18th century, the Islamic world has been oscillating between these two extremes in the face of an increasingly powerful West. The Ottoman Empire had tried to modernize and achieve some results, but due to the collapse of the Empire caused by the Involvement of the Ottomans in World War I, everything fell silent. Watson pointed out that the First World War led to a strong sense of disillusionment, many people lost faith in science culture and materialism, and the post-war Islamic world witnessed two parallel currents of thought, although modernism continued in many fields, and religious extremism represented by the "Muslim Brotherhood" that was founded in Egypt also began to take root.
<h3>02 From the Six-Day War to 9/11: The Global Spread of Religious Extremism</h3>
The Third Middle East War (also known as the Six-Day War) marked a psychological turning point in contemporary Middle Eastern history. On June 5, 1967, Israel launched a large-scale preemptive attack that destroyed Egypt's air power in just two hours. The Arab countries of Jordan, Iran and Syria entered the war, but their air power was annihilated on the afternoon of the same day. By 10 July, Israel had occupied the Sinai Peninsula, Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. As a result of this battle, the establishment of the State of Israel and its development into a military power at an astonishing rate are deeply engraved in the hearts of the Arabs, who have lost not only their army and territory, but also their confidence in their leaders, their country and even themselves. As Pagordon puts it, "As the world around them slowly disintegrates, Desperate Muslims, like the once Ottomans, turn their gaze to history," and religious extremism begins to fill the faith vacuum.
The development of religious extremism in the contemporary Islamic world is inextricably linked to the Egyptian thinker Said Qutb. His early travels to the United States led Kutb to develop a deep disdain for the lack of faith and materialism in the secular society of the West, represented by the United States, and he turned his head to defend the purity and advanced nature of Islamic culture. Qutb divides the world into two camps, Islam and "Jasilia", which refers not only to the period of obscurity and barbarism before the Prophet Muhammad brought the oracle, but also to all aspects of modern life, such as etiquette, morality, art, literature, law, etc. He opposed modern technology and the cult of science, arguing that science undermined the harmony between man and nature. He insisted that only a radical opposition to rationalism and Western values could bring hope for Salvation in Islam. When Qutb was hanged by the Egyptian nasser government in 1966, his martyr status was unshakable in the hearts of Islamic fundamentalists, and his discourse laid the foundation for the growth of contemporary Islamic extremism.
In Wright's view, the development of contemporary Islamic extremism stems from the overall sense of loss in the Islamic world after World War II – at a time when democracy and personal incomes are rising rapidly in all other parts of the world, Arab countries, from Iraq to Morocco, are stagnating in economic, political and cultural development. One statistic is that excluding oil revenues from the Gulf countries, a total of 260 million Arabs export less than 5 million Finns. According to Wright's analysis:
"Expectations are rising, but opportunities are becoming less and less, and radicalism often rises in this gap. In the Gulf region, this is even more pronounced: the population is predominantly young, who have nothing to do and are bored; the arts are extremely poor; people's entertainment (film, theater and music) is either under surveillance or completely oblivious; young men are inaccessible to women and therefore have no comfort and normal social interaction. Adults are illiterate, which is commonplace in most Arab countries. Unemployment is the highest in the third world. Anger, hatred and humiliation prompt young Arabs to seek an extreme way out. ”
Bin Laden was one of these angry and humiliated Arabs. As a member of the Saudi upper class, his religious piety and anger are rare, but like many desperate young Saudis, he finds solace in a dualistic spiritual world. From 1979 to 1989, bin Laden abandoned his studies and went to Afghanistan to participate in Islamic Jihad against Soviet aggression. In 1988, he founded Al-Qaida in Afghanistan, a group of young, submissive, fanatical jihadists whose goal was to "establish truth, rid evil, and an Islamic state." With the end of the War in Afghanistan in 1989 and the outbreak of the Gulf War in 1991, when the United States began to control strategic points in the Arab world, al-Qaida transformed into an anti-American terrorist organization.
Al-Qaida claimed that "our oil" provided the energy for America's frenzied expansion, and Wright noticed that the remarks exuded a certain sense of injustice that "someone else stole their own stuff." He pointed out that international trade in oil (or other forms) was supposed to help Islam integrate into a globalized, corporatized, interdependent, secularist world, accumulating the capital needed to modernize, but in the eyes of Islamic radicals, modernity, progress, trade, consumption, and even pleasure are all Western attacks on Islam. As the most materially and culturally powerful nation since the war, the United States, which promoted these values and the mechanisms by which they operate, is the greatest enemy that could destroy the Islamic world. "If the United States holds the future, Islamist militants need to own the past, and by restoring sharia law rule, Islamic militants can fend off eroding Western forces," he wrote.
To become a global terrorist organization, al-Qaida also needs to break through some theological barriers, as witnessed by the escalating levels of terrorism in the 1990s. On 29 December 1992, al-Qaida launched a bomb attack in Aden, Yemen, which had been aimed at U.S. troops, but only one Australian tourist and one Yemeni hotel employee were among the victims. Ethical discussions took place within Al-Qaida, and Abu Hayel Iraq, the leader of al-Qaida's Commission of Holy Orders, issued two holy orders: one that allowed attacks on U.S. forces and the second that allowed the killing of innocent people. In August 1993, a jihadist group led by Dr. Ayman Zawahiri launched a suicide bomb attack in an attempt to assassinate Egyptian Interior Minister Hassan Alfi. It broke the strong taboo of Islam prohibiting suicide, making such attacks a hallmark of jihadist assassinations. On 19 November 1995, jihadist groups bombed the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, killing 16 people (excluding two suicide bombers) and injuring 60 others. Zawahiri pushed the logic of legalizing the harm to the innocent and committing suicide to the limit, declaring that while innocent people, such as children and true Muslims, may die in explosions, the rules on the indiscriminate killing of innocents must be relaxed in emergencies where the enemy is too powerful; as for attackers who gave their lives for religious belief, they should be regarded as martyrs. When jihadist groups merged with al-Qaida in 1996, Zawahiri became al-Qaida's ideological leader, and the group's terrorist attacks were naturally supported by these logics.
On August 23, 1996, bin Laden issued a "Declaration of War Against Americans Occupying Two Holy Lands," calling "one of the most serious disasters for Muslims since the death of the Prophet" the presence of U.S. and multinational forces in Saudi Arabia. Two years later, al-Qaida issued a holy decree that escalated the intensity of its targets and rhetoric, claiming to shift the targets of the struggle from regional conflict to global Islamic jihad against the United States. In Wright's view, bin Laden, who declared war on the United States in a cave in Afghanistan, intended to confront not so much the United States as modernity itself.
Yet U.S. authorities have been unaware of the threat posed by bin Laden and al-Qaida. Wright's investigation showed that the US intelligence service has limited understanding of the Middle East issues, except for a few highly sensitive personnel, most people lack vigilance against the depth and breadth of terrorist activities in the Middle East, and the FBI and the CIA of the two major intelligence agencies still have the problem of poor information exchange. The February 26, 1993 terrorist attack on the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center was supposed to be a wake-up call when a Muslim named Ramiz Yusuf drove a car loaded with a bomb into the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center, exploding through six floors, killing six people and injuring 1,042 others. Wright noted that long ago, Islamist militants had the idea of launching a dramatic, highly symbolic terrorist attack. A few years later, Yusuf's uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed visited bin Laden in Afghanistan, bringing with him a package of attacks on the United States, one of which was to train pilots to crash and destroy buildings. Although bin Laden did not make a clear statement at the time, the seeds of 9/11 were clearly planted.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Americans were shocked and horrified to realize that the flames of religious extremism had burned to the United States. The victims of the World Trade Center came from 62 countries around the world, with different races, ages, sexual orientations, cultural backgrounds, occupations and lifestyles, and it was globalization that brought them together on this destined day of disaster. In Wright's view, in this sense alone, we have reason to believe that "al-Qaida is targeting the United States, but it has hit all of humanity." ”
<h3>03 After "9/11"</h3>
Zukov argues that the depth of the trauma inflicted on the United States by 9/11 makes this date the most important coordinate for dividing the life experience of contemporary Americans:
"Every day's experience is divided into pre- and post-9/11, and every day people have to adapt to a new world in which every security checkpoint brings about a physical change, and every mention of 'homeland' brings about a psychological change, and before 9/11, Americans rarely used the word 'homeland.'"
Five days after the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history, then-U.S. President George W. Bush was killed in a car accident. W. Bush declared: "We know, the American people know, that this crusade, this war on terror, will last for some time." Margaret MacMillan, a professor of history at Oxford University, argues that if the White House had studied history a little more, President George W. Bush probably would not have used the term "crusade" so flippantly, because even the mildest Muslims would instinctively associate the word with historical Western aggression.
From the perspective of Islamist radicals, the reaction of the US authorities may confirm their belief that the eternal war between the Islamic world and the Western world has been going on. Also because of the lack of understanding of history, the United States rashly launched a war and fell into the quagmire of the chaotic situation in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was not until the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 that the United States completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan, leaving behind a devastated and weak country.
In Pagorden's view, the biggest lesson that 9/11 and its subsequent developments revealed to the West was an overly optimistic reading of Islamic history and an overly wishful belief that liberal democracy was a universal political system. This assumption mistakenly holds that societies that have no concept of the theory of the government contract and who cannot conceive at all of the ability of someone to voluntarily hand over power will naturally embrace democracy. More importantly, the view that human beings are inherently hungry for freedom ignores the equally strong desire for order and direction in human life, which religion can provide, especially in disorderly societies, where people despair of a life of marginalization, deprivation, and insecurity:
"For the deprived class, even if it is only premised on unproven revelation, it has an overwhelming and completely understandable appeal. For many Muslims who live a life of poverty and instability, the creed about the afterlife, even the most extreme example of a quick suicide, seems more practical than the distant, unforeseen benefits of giving up Allah. ”
Today, we may instead understand the sense of despair that pervades the Islamic world. Zhou Yijun, a veteran media person who worked as a resident reporter in the Middle East, said in an interview that even within 15 years, she believes that the impact of 9/11 on the world pattern is very profound, but looking back at 9/11 20 years later, its influence on the world pattern has declined, and the issue of Sino-US relations or globalization is the main theme of today's world. Since the 2008 financial crisis, it has become increasingly clear that globalization under the neoliberal economic order has revolutionized the divide between the winners and the losers – not only between the First and Third Worlds (or between the West and the Islamic world as seen by Islamist radicals), but also within the Western world. Brexit and Trump's election in 2016 brought to the fore this tension simmering within the Western world.
While Islamic radicals see the United States as a bastion of secularism and materialism, ironically, the United States is a country that is both extremely secular and very devout. Beginning in 1980, americans of faith — be they fundamentalist Protestants, devout Catholics, or Orthodox Jews — began to move closer to the Republican Party, while secular Americans fell to the Democratic Party, and the political divisions caused by partisan struggles reached new heights in the four years of Trump's administration. We are beginning to find similarities between academic analysis of American populism (especially the discourse of the religious right) and the discourse of Islamic religious radicalism— a refusal to accept the complexities of modern society in an era of rapid change and increasing complexity, and thinking in terms of some kind of black-and-white traditional religious logic, which can provide the uneasy people with the sense of certainty and security they crave.
We can also see that in the face of the overall sense of loss, shame, and resentment that globalization brings, blaming problems on moral depravity and social purification in the form of deprivation of individual freedoms is also how many Americans respond to failure. In this regard, two things are happening in Afghanistan and the United States that form a mirror image: at the same time that the Taliban gender policy imposes strict regulations on women's public appearances and social interactions, the U.S. state of Texas has imposed the nation's harshest state-level abortion ban, abortion after six weeks of pregnancy is almost completely banned, and pregnancies resulting from rape or incest are not exempt.
Twenty years later, 9/11 may be moving from news events to history, and its impact on the world may be fading. But this incident at the dawn of the new millennium still reminds us today that even though human beings have always prided themselves on being rational animals, emotions and emotions can still dictate the direction of collective destiny at some historical moments.
Resources:
[Canada] Margaret Macmillan. The Use and Abuse of History. Guangxi Normal University Press.2021.
Mitchell Zukaov. Fall and Rebirth: The Story of 9/11. Wenhui Publishing House.2021.
Anthony Pagdon. The War of Two Worlds: 2500 Years of Competition Between East and West. Democracy and Construction Press.2018.
Peter Watson. The History of Ideas: From Fire to Freud. Yilin Publishing House.2018.
Lawrence Wright. Tower of Doom: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Shanghai Translation Publishing House.2014.
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