The Terror of the Turban: Civilians, Suspects and Twenty Years Post 9/11

Will the 20th Anniversary of 9/11 be marked by solemn ceremonies? Will the 20th Anniversary of 9/11 be a memorial for the 480,000–507,000 killed (Crawford 2018) in the U.S. led post 9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan? Will there be broad public discussions about the 6.4 trillion (Costs of War 2021) dollars (estimated) spending on the U.S. led war on terror? Will the question be asked again, why is the Guantanamo Bay still open?

In this segment devoted to the 20th Anniversary of 9/11, the four authors representing four different disciplines illuminate that no singular narrative, discipline or genre can capture the multi-dimensional scope and effects of September 11, 2001. Yet, this singular event provoked what came to be known as the “Global War on Terror” – the terrors that were local, national and global. Terrors that were and are on-going, which include, but not limited to various forms of exclusions, bans, detentions, incarcerations, tortures, wars, recessions. Terrors that gave rise to Islamophobia, the fear of the turban, loss of civil liberties, color-coded systems of surveillance, the illegal war in Iraq and mass fatalities, the rise of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act, the raids, round-ups, deportations and new ways of conceptualizing terrorists, and their collaborators. Terrors that terrorized civilians, or what Tram Nguyen quite aptly named in her ethnographic study, We are All Suspects Now Nguyen (2005).

I lived in East Texas when the two planes struck the Twin Towers. The South Tower crumbled at 9.59 am after burning for around 56 minutes, and then the North Tower collapsed at 10.28 am. Immediately after, I was told to keep my head down because the “The Texas Knights,” a Ku Klux Klan organization was located only 35 miles away from where I lived. Within days of 9/11, I started receiving recruiting pamphlets from various East Texan KKK organizations, listing the criteria required to join the Klan. Among them were a list of essentials. “Must be 100% White.” “Must be a Christian.” “Must be willing to spread the radical message to our lost brothers and sisters in your local area.”

While the KKK actively recruited white supremacists, the rise of the national security surveillance state, as I have noted elsewhere, altered the benevolent host-guest relationship that South-Asian immigrants shared with America. The resident and the non-resident “aliens suddenly (sic) [became] dangerous enemies who must be detained and contained.” (Dutt-Ballerstadt 2010, 105). The USA Patriot Act issued by the U.S. Senate on October 26, 2001, allowed the attorney general to “take into custody” any alien suspected of activities that endangered “the national security of the United States.” Giorgio Agamben in State of Exception notes how Gorge Bush’s order “radically era[sed]any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being” (Agamben 2005, 3). Then, within days of September 11, 2001, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh-American gas station owner in Mesa, Arizona was murdered by Frank Roque on September 15, 2001. Roque, wanted to ‘kill a Muslim’ in retaliation for the terrorist attacks. During his arrest Roque boasted, “I’m a patriot.” “I stand for America all the way” (SALDEF 2021).

While Sodhi’s murder was marked as the first 9/11 backlash fatality, “[j]ust a few months before the tenth anniversary of his death … the Arizona legislature decided to remove Mr. Sodhi’s name from the state 9/11 memorial because he was not deemed “a victim of 9/11” (SALDEF 2021). The legislation even elaborated that the removed plaque of Sodhi be sold to a scrap metal dealer. The original sponsor of the bill, Rep. Kavanaugh stated, “It’s part of a myth that, following 9/11, Americans went into a xenophobic rage against foreigners. That’s not true. America’s reaction towards foreigners was commendable.” (SALDEF 2021). After much advocacy by community groups, Governor Jan Brewer vetoed the bill and continued to honor the memory of Mr. Sodhi. In 2020, Valarie Kaur a Sikh activist, civil rights lawyer and a film maker in her memoir, See No Strange (Kaur, 2020) recalled her memory of her family friend and uncle Balbir Singh Sodhi’s murder and the images of the crime scene. She remembered the yellow police tape with Sodhi’s body face-down on the ground. His turban knocked to the ground, and his brothers standing in front of the media cameras and weeping.

Outright racism, the fear of the brown and the Muslim, mistaken identities and Islamophobia had all joined hands, as Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered the rounding up and detention of hundreds of Muslim immigrant men. Ironically enough, of the 762 men detained and many indiscriminately arrested in connection with the FBI terrorism investigation, none had any connections whatsoever with the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

On September 24, in The New Yorker and in a segment titled as “Tuesday and After: New Yorker Writers Respond to 9/11” (Sontag 2021) Susan Sontag’s piece came under much scrutiny. In this brief but scathing geopolitical analysis Sontag said the following that may have hurt the patriotic sentiments that day but clearly called out the perpetrators:

The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word “cowardly” is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards. (Sontag 2001)

Sontag’s words mimicked what the Princeton educated protagonist in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Chengez Khan felt when he witnessed the collapsing of the Twin Towers, while working in Manila. Chengez felt pleasure. He smiled. And then tells his readers, “Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased” (Hamid 2007, 72). Chengez later explains: “So, when I tell you I was pleased at the slaughter of thousands of innocents, I do so with a profound sense of perplexity … I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone has so visibly brought America to her knees” (73). Upon returning to America from Manila, Chengez is detained at the airport and hence the beginning of Changez’s encounters with state sponsored racism, terrorism and exclusions in America that brown Muslim men in America faced post 9/11. Such resistance to the dictates of the culture produced by the “War on Terror” are also evident in novels such as Randa Jarrar’s Map of Home Jarrar (2008), Amy Walden’s The Submission Walden (2011), Ayad Akhtar’s play, Disgraced Akhtar (2013), and cultural analysis by scholars and cultural critics like Junaid Rana’s Terrifying Muslims Rana (2011), Sunaina Maira’s Missing Maira (2009), Vijay Prashad’s Uncle Swami Prashad (2014), Daisy Rockwell’s The Little Book of Terror Rockwell (2012) and others.

The four essays written in this segment on Provocations continue the line of inquiry and provide an interdisciplinary conversation on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. These essays cover Islamophobia and the socio-political global repercussions of 9/11 on Kashmir, to the role of one’s artistic representations via film-making, and issues of pedagogy and praxis of being a postcolonial teacher-scholar post 9/11 in a right-wing state.

Deepa Kumar, a media studies scholar in her essay, “Rightwing and Liberal Islamophobia: The Change of Imperial Guard from Trump to Biden” explores Islamophobia and the continuities and discontinuities between the Trump and previous post-Cold War administrations. While Trump’s illiberal hegemony elevated rightwing anti-Muslim racism, and marked a shift in US imperial posture, Kumar argues that Biden’s presidency will only bring back liberal hegemony and liberal Islamophobia. While the end of the Trump era is a welcome development, Kumar reminds us that a return to the “old order” is not the restoration of a pre-racist era, but one in which multiculturalism will serve to paper over imperial racism.

Mara Ahmed is an independent activist filmmaker committed to illuminating stories from the periphery. In her essay, “Twenty Years Since 9/11: An Activist Filmmaker’s Take,” Ahmed notes how relatively invisible American Muslim communities were suddenly thrust into the limelight in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Yet, this hypervisibility did not mean that Muslim voices were included in the frantic cultural production that followed 9/11 that were driven for the most part by Orientalist stereotypes and Islamophobic misrepresentations. Her first documentary, The Muslims I Know (2008), sought to remedy this imbalance by allowing a small community of Muslims to speak for themselves. As the “War on Terror” became fortified under Barrack Obama and Pakistan became the most hated country on earth, Ahmed shot another film that tried to create an interface between ordinary Pakistanis and American audiences. In her essay she contemplates how she centers “othering” as a principled investment in transversal, global solidarities.

While the repercussions of 9/11 were profoundly felt within the U.S, Mohamad Junaid reminds us of what he calls the ripple effects of 9/11 in his essay, “From a distant shore to the war at home: 9/11 and Kashmir.” Mohamad reflects on how the dominant US framing of the events of 9/11 was appropriated by dominant states to repress struggles for freedom and justice in the name of “global war on terror.” Focusing on India’s counterinsurgency war in Kashmir, he argues that the India government, led by the rightwing BJP, systematically used the “global war on terror” to advance its anti-Muslim rhetoric, crushing of dissent, and settler-colonial policies in Kashmir.

The stakes of teaching about Muslim-American-West relationships have always been challenging within the imperial construction of our universities. Immediately following 9/11 a web-based organization called “Campus Watch” started creating dossiers and blacklisting U.S. based postcolonial scholars claiming that postcolonialism is “a politically activist theory.” While this organization was deemed as engaging in McCarthyesque intimidation, it continued to campaign against professors whose teachings and research they deemed to fuel anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism.

Maimuna Dali Islam in her essay “Pedagogy, Colonialism, and the Possibilities of Belonging: Twenty Years On” narrates how she carved out space for non-Orientalist Muslim experiences and voices in her literary courses, seeking narratives that navigated interplays of colonialism, migrations, and contesting/contested Muslim identities. Using blends of literary and nonliterary interdisciplinary texts, she created a Muslim-centered postcolonial literature curriculum of intertwined histories and destinies of Muslims with/in the West that spanned the Americas, Australasia, Africa, and South Asia. Islam while asserting how these narratives illuminated centuries-old patterns that echoed in the post-9/11 targeting of Muslims within and beyond the U.S. borders, her teachings offered her an opportunity to negotiate with her own space/place in America and her right to visibly belong.

As we approach the 20th Anniversary of 9/11, these four essays in Provocations invites readers to rethink the various frameworks of productions (literary, cultural, artistic, political, sociological and pedagogic) marking the stakes of living in a post 9/11 world.

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Notes on contributors

Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt

Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt professor of English and Gender Studies and is the Edith Green Distinguished Professor at Linfield University. She is a cultural critics, poet and public intellectual and the author of the monograph, The Postcolonial Citizen: The Intellectual Migrant (2010) and the lead co-editor of Civility, Free-Speech and Academic Freedom in Higher Education: Faculty on the Margins (2021) and serves as the editor for Inside Higher Ed’s column “Conditionally Accepted.”