September 11

I was thirteen years old. I had managed to oversleep and miss the bus to school, but, luckily for me, my mom wasn’t working that morning, so she gave me a ride. For some reason, the radio was turned off in the car. I don’t know why. I always remember listening to MIX 101.9 or POWER 105.7 when we were in the car, but that day there was no music.

It was silent.

When I arrived to school, my first period English class was nearly over. Everyone was standing around the one computer in the classroom reading about something, but I didn’t know what. I asked a friend what had happened. He said, “A plane crashed into the World Trade Center.”

I laughed.

The thirteen-year-old me didn’t really know what the World Trade Center was, nor that it was synonymous with the Twin Towers. The thirteen-year-old me didn’t make the connection between the New York City skyline and the World Trade Center. The thirteen-year-old me laughed at the fact that someone had accidentally crashed a plane into a big building.

I didn’t realize it wasn’t an accident.

By the time I got to second period, I started to hear the words “attack” and “terrorism”. Then I started to remember images of the Oklahoma City Bombing, which was much closer to my backyard. I wasn’t laughing anymore. I started to feel scared. In third period, my art teacher was desperately trying to reach his father who worked in the World Trade Center. He finally got through to discover his father hadn’t gone to work that day.

He was one of the lucky ones.

I remember very little about the rest of that day. My family had to go shopping and all the televisions in the store had Wolf Blitzer on CNN reporting the events of the day. The cashier highlighted that the date was 911, the same as the emergency phone number. The main thing I remember is the fear I felt. Fear of the future. Fear of the unknown.

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In the days after September 11, 2001, there was a great fervor of patriotism among Americans, but there was also something very dangerous starting to brew. The government quickly named Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaida as the culprits, but somehow the whole of Islam got sucked in as well. Any person suspected of being even remotely linked to Islam was considered Al Qaida. It didn’t matter if the person was Muslim or not, if they had dark features, they were assumed terrorist until proven innocent.

Growing up in the heart of the “Bible Belt”, I didn’t meet a Muslim until five years after 9/11, when I was in University. She was my World Literatures professor. She was Syrian and wore a loose headscarf that was in constant danger of falling off her head. I remember thinking she was, for lack of a better word, cool and I was also astounded that she didn’t conform to the stereotypes I had associated with Muslim women.

I don’t know how I learned the stereotypes, whether it was in my school, the media or both, but I had come to consider Muslim women to be very weak. I didn’t associate them with knowledge in the least. However, my professor completely changed my outlook on Muslim women. She was strong, educated and, shockingly, empowered. I learned about literature in her class, but I also learned about the world and different cultures. We read excerpts from the Bible, the Torah, the Koran and the Bhagavad gita. We had discussions about different cultures and learned to see things through various cultural lenses. Yet the most surprising thing my professor did was to challenge our ethnocentric ideas about September 11.

On September 11, 2006, in honor of the moment of silence for the attacks on the World Trade Center, my professor reminded us of other events on September 11. September 11, 1943 saw the start of the liquidation of ghettos in Minsk and Lida by Nazis. September 11, 1973 was the Chilean coup which began a deadly dictatorship, lasting nearly two decades. In the one week of September 5-11, 2006, twenty Iraqi civilians, including men, women and children, were killed in the Iraq War.

These events were not mentioned by my professor to lessen the tragedy of the loss of nearly 3,000 people in the September 11, 2001 attacks. They were said to remind us that everyday tragedies around the world occur. Everyday another innocent life is taken. We should never forget the tragedy of the World Trade Center, but we should also not turn a blind eye to the tragedies that happen around the world, or make our tragedy somehow more important than the tragedies of other people.

Although the events of September 11, 2001 impacted me in ways I can never fully describe, or even fully understand, there have been many other more significant events that have shaped my world views. Today marks twelve years since the attacks on the World Trade Center, and seven years since I sat in that World Literature class. I have now traveled around the world and met people from many different backgrounds. In the past few years, I have become close friends with Muslims and I have lived in the largest Muslim populated country in the world. I don’t share the beliefs of my Muslim friends, but I have learned about what they actually believe.

My World Literature professor was the first to open my eyes and I have since been able to recognize that what happened that day had nothing to do with Islam. Just like what happened in the Crusades and the Inquisition had nothing to do with Christianity. All the violence of the world can be traced to individuals who simply don’t understand; individuals who turn messages of hope into messages of hate; individuals who would judge an entire people based on a few.

On this September 11th, I challenge you. Go out into the world. Learn about a new culture. Talk to a stranger with whom you think you have nothing in common. By building bridges of understanding, we can eliminate the power of a few individuals to destroy.

Together, we can create.