WASHINGTON: Twenty-five years ago, on a bright September morning, America woke up to a different world. I was in Washington.
I was asleep when John Hendel, our news editor at the American news agency where I worked, called.
“There have been attacks of Biblical proportions in New York and Washington,” he said. “Go out and see what is happening. But come back and sleep. We have transferred you to the news desk. You’ll be doing night shifts.”
My wife, Bushra, and I went out. We lived in downtown Washington, and the city suddenly looked unfamiliar. Armoured personnel carriers stood at crossroads and strategic points. Men in uniform were everywhere. The capital of the world’s most powerful country looked like a city preparing for war.
We reached the White House. Bushra was wearing a shalwar-kameez. Near the White House, a man stopped his bicycle, pointed at her and shouted: “There goes a terrorist. Catch her, catch her.” A few people stopped, looked and walked on.
I remember that moment vividly, perhaps because it contained, in miniature, something that would become much larger in the years that followed.
The woman walking beside me had not changed. Her clothes had not changed. I had not changed. But suddenly those clothes could be interpreted differently. Something that had always meant home, culture and identity could, in somebody else’s eyes, become evidence of something sinister.
Later, we drove as close to the Pentagon as we could. Smoke was still rising. There was a large hole in the building. We interviewed people who had seen the plane hit.
Washington was frightened, but it did not descend into chaos. There was no mass killing, burning or looting. Government continued to function. People tried to understand what had happened and what might happen next. Yet something had happened to America that could not be seen in the smoke. America had changed.
The physical destruction of September 11 was enormous: the World Trade Centre was destroyed, the Pentagon was struck, and nearly 3,000 people were killed. But the consequences went far beyond the buildings and the people who died that morning.
The attacks changed the way Americans thought about safety, government, war, immigration, surveillance and, perhaps most importantly, one another.
Before September 11, many Americans could believe that the great threats to their country existed somewhere else. Wars happened overseas. Terrorism was something that appeared on television from distant places. The oceans seemed to provide a measure of protection.
Then four aeroplanes crossed those oceans and turned ordinary American objects into weapons. The country discovered its vulnerability.
The response was understandable. America had been attacked, and Americans wanted protection. The government created new security institutions, tightened controls at airports and borders, expanded intelligence gathering and embarked on wars that would last for decades. The language of national security entered everyday life.
But every society pays a price for living in permanent fear. Privacy became something that had to be balanced against security. Surveillance became a familiar part of public life. Immigration and national security became increasingly connected in the public imagination. People began to look more closely at those who seemed foreign, different or difficult to classify.
For American Muslims, the change was particularly painful.
The men who attacked America claimed to act in the name of Islam. American Muslims had nothing to do with their crimes, yet they found themselves living under a shadow cast by people they had never met and whose actions they condemned.
Muslims were simultaneously victims of terrorism and, in some eyes, objects of suspicion because of terrorism. That was one of the great ironies of September 11.
The attacks did not merely produce fear of terrorism. They produced a new social question: Who is an American, and how do we recognise one?
For many Muslim Americans, the question became personal. A name could matter. A beard could matter. A headscarf could matter. A language could matter. A passport could matter. Even the alphabet in which a newspaper was printed could matter.
I discovered this for myself when I visited New York soon after the attacks. I was on a train from Queens to Manhattan. It was packed, but nobody was looking at me. For a while I felt safe in the anonymity of the crowd.
Then a burly white man boarded. His shirt carried Gen. George Patton’s famous philosophy of war: the aim was not to die for your country but to make the other fellow die for his. He sat opposite me, put his newspaper away and stared at me. I had no reason to believe he wanted to hurt me.
But fear does not always require a reason. I tried to ignore him, but my fear —a nd something like guilt — rose in my throat.
I called my friend Haider Rizvi in Brooklyn. Days earlier, Haider had been beaten outside a bar near his apartment. He knew something about this kind of hatred. Years earlier, Muslim zealots in Islamabad had burned his motorcycle because of his unconventional views. Years later, he moved to New York.
“It is a city I respect,” he once told me. “It allowed me to be lost in its madness. It is so big and so crowded that you can live here without being discovered by friends or foes.”
That was one of the great gifts of New York: anonymity. After September 11, even that anonymity seemed less secure.
When I told Haider about the man staring at me on the train, he panicked.
“Get off the train. Take a cab and come over to me,” he said.
The train entered the tunnel and our conversation was cut off. I looked around for reassurance — a friendly smile, a familiar face, a little affection. I found none.
When I got off, my phone rang.
“What happened?”
“We got disconnected.”
“Keep it on. I’ll keep checking.” And he did. By then I felt better.
I walked from Grand Central Station toward the United Nations, a walk I had always enjoyed, passing people of every colour and creed. Suddenly I understood why I liked that walk so much.
It allowed me to forget myself. Becoming anonymous in a great city is liberating. You need not explain your religion, country, language or history. You are simply another person walking down the street.
Coming into Manhattan from Queens on the A train, however, I had tried to hide behind an Urdu newspaper. Then I realised my mistake. Few people might know what Urdu was, but many could recognise its Arabic script. It could identify me as one of “them.”
I folded the newspaper and picked up the New York Post. A girl wearing a hijab entered the train and sat beside me.
“Salaam,” I said.
She smiled but did not answer. Was she nervous? Or was I imagining fear everywhere? I don’t know. A large group of mostly white men entered. Their presence somehow increased my fear. I looked for the Muslim girl. She was gone.
The train passed through stations where World Trade Centre commuters once emerged every morning. I felt dizzy. Something inside me seemed broken. I felt incomplete. Even the UN building looked different. Hundreds of soldiers guarded it. There were more on motorboats, patrolling the Hudson.
Looking back after twenty-five years, I realise that this was not simply the fear of an individual immigrant. It was the beginning of a much larger psychological transformation.
The country was trying to determine how much freedom it could sacrifice for safety. Muslims were trying to determine how much of their identity they could display without becoming targets.
And America as a whole was trying to decide whether difference was something to be celebrated, tolerated or feared.
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