Remembering and reinterpreting 9/11

Seventeen years have passed since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, long enough for an entire generation to grow up under its shadow. Kids born on 9/11 are beginning their senior year in high school and finalising their college applications and people must be in their 20s to hold any direct memories of the day itself. 

As a college instructor teaching the history and politics of the modern Middle East, I really became aware of the generational shift when I heard my students talking about 9/11 the way I do about the Iranian revolution as something that happened before my time but whose legacy continues to resonate powerfully today. There is nothing quite like realising that one’s students were barely born when events took place that still seem as if they happened yesterday to make one feel they are getting old. As with any other major world event, the inexorable passage of 9/11 from lived experience into history triggers a secondary debate about how memories of that era-defining day are recalled. Throughout the ages, history and memory have been contested and recreated as time has passed and agendas have changed. In Britain, the way the First World War was remembered shifted markedly in the 1950s as the generation of parents of the soldiers who had died in that war passed away and the horrors of 1914-18 were superseded by those of the Second World War. As it became more socially acceptable in Britain to question why the First World War had been fought in the first place, radical critiques such as Oh! What a Lovely War and The Donkeys redefined popular images of the war for an entire generation, immortalised in the lampooning of the bungling generals in Blackadder Goes Forth in the early 1990s.Memories of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, DC have come under renewed focus over the past year as they have intersected with the Gulf crisis caused by the blockade of Qatar by four regional states posing as an ‘Anti-Terror Quartet.’ Between them, the four members of the so-called Quartet – Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates – constituted the nationalities of 18 of the 19 hijackers who took over and crashed the four airplanes on 9/11. Moreover, the attacks were masterminded by a Saudi citizen, albeit one who had been stripped of his citizenship by the Saudi authorities and were facilitated by funding which largely flowed through Dubai on its way to the US. And yet, one of the first acts of the 'Anti-Terror Quartettarget="_blank"'>