9/11 and the wars that followed
Al-Qaeda hijackers kill nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, and the United States launches two decades of war in Afghanistan and Iraq that reshape how Muslims are seen and treated.
- The 9/11 Commission Report — National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (2004)
- Costs of War: Human Costs of the Post-9/11 Wars — Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University (2023)
- September 11 attacks — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Islam: The Straight Path — John L. Esposito, Oxford University Press
- U.S. Muslims Concerned About Their Place in Society, but Continue to Believe in the American Dream — Pew Research Center (2017)
- The World's Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society — Pew Research Center (2013)
- Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy — Jonathan A. C. Brown, Oneworld (2014)
- The Qur'an: A New Translation — M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (trans.), Oxford University Press (Oxford World's Classics) (2004)
- The Arabs: A History — Eugene Rogan, Basic Books (2009)
- Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World — Edward W. Said, Pantheon (1981)
- Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism since 1979 — Thomas Hegghammer, Cambridge University Press (2010)
- A History of Saudi Arabia (2nd edition) — Madawi Al-Rasheed, Cambridge University Press (2010)
On the morning of 11 September 2001, nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers seized four airliners. Two destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York, one hit the Pentagon outside Washington, and the fourth, United 93, crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers fought back. 2,977 people were killed, among them dozens of Muslims and more than 400 firefighters, police officers and other first responders; it was the deadliest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor.
- The 9/11 Commission Report — National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (2004)
- September 11 attacks — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- The 9/11 Commission Report — National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (2004)
- Islam: The Straight Path — John L. Esposito, Oxford University Press
The overwhelming majority of Muslim scholars and organisations rejected al-Qaeda’s claim to speak for Islam. Classical Islamic law on war forbids targeting non-combatants, and the Qur’an likens killing one innocent person to killing all of humanity.
- Islam: The Straight Path — John L. Esposito, Oxford University Press
- Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet's Legacy — Jonathan A. C. Brown, Oneworld (2014)
- The Qur'an: A New Translation — M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (trans.), Oxford University Press (Oxford World's Classics) (2004)
- The World's Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society — Pew Research Center (2013)
Unity and fear
For a few weeks the country was unusually united: flags everywhere, President George W. Bush’s approval ratings above 90%, and an outpouring of sympathy from abroad. The government created the Department of Homeland Security, passed the Patriot Act expanding surveillance, and transformed air travel. Muslim, Arab and Sikh Americans faced a wave of hate crimes; a Sikh gas-station owner in Arizona was murdered four days after the attacks by a man who mistook him for a Muslim. Mosques were monitored and names on passenger lists flagged.
- The 9/11 Commission Report — National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (2004)
- U.S. Muslims Concerned About Their Place in Society, but Continue to Believe in the American Dream — Pew Research Center (2017)
- Islam: The Straight Path — John L. Esposito, Oxford University Press
- U.S. Muslims Concerned About Their Place in Society, but Continue to Believe in the American Dream — Pew Research Center (2017)
Two wars
In October 2001 the United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan, whose Taliban rulers had sheltered bin Laden. In March 2003 the Bush administration invaded Iraq, arguing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorism; neither claim proved true. The occupation unleashed a sectarian civil war between Sunnis and Shia and the rise of al-Qaeda in Iraq, later the so-called Islamic State.
- Costs of War: Human Costs of the Post-9/11 Wars — Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University (2023)
- September 11 attacks — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- The Arabs: A History — Eugene Rogan, Basic Books (2009)
US special forces killed bin Laden in Pakistan in May 2011. US combat troops left Iraq that year (returning later to fight the Islamic State) and left Afghanistan in August 2021, in a chaotic withdrawal as the Taliban retook Kabul. About 7,000 US service members died in the post-9/11 wars; Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates that more than 900,000 people, more than 400,000 of them civilians, were killed directly by violence in the post-9/11 war zones of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria and Yemen, overwhelmingly Muslims, with millions more dying of indirect effects such as disease and lost health care.
- Costs of War: Human Costs of the Post-9/11 Wars — Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University (2023)
What it left
Torture (“enhanced interrogation”) and the Abu Ghraib scandal, detention without trial at Guantánamo Bay and the mass surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013 sparked lasting arguments about whether America had betrayed its own principles, and deepened the sense among many Muslims that the “war on terror” was a war on them. By the 2010s, scepticism of “forever wars” had become common ground for many Democrats and Republicans alike.
- Costs of War: Human Costs of the Post-9/11 Wars — Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University (2023)
- The 9/11 Commission Report — National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (2004)
- Islam: The Straight Path — John L. Esposito, Oxford University Press
The period also produced a counter-current: interfaith initiatives, Muslim civic organisations, and a generation of young Western Muslims who insisted on being both fully Muslim and fully American, British or French, and who resent the constant demand to apologise for crimes committed in their faith’s name.
- U.S. Muslims Concerned About Their Place in Society, but Continue to Believe in the American Dream — Pew Research Center (2017)
- Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World — Edward W. Said, Pantheon (1981)
- Islam: The Straight Path — John L. Esposito, Oxford University Press
The attacks demanded a global fight against jihadist terrorism; removing the Taliban and pursuing al-Qaeda prevented further mass-casualty attacks on American soil, and Osama bin Laden was finally killed in 2011. Leaders such as President George W. Bush stressed that the enemy was terrorism, not Islam.
- The 9/11 Commission Report — National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (2004)
- September 11 attacks — Encyclopaedia Britannica
The Iraq War was launched on false claims about weapons of mass destruction, torture and mass surveillance betrayed American values, and the wars killed hundreds of thousands of people and ended with the Taliban back in power in 2021.
- Costs of War: Human Costs of the Post-9/11 Wars — Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University (2023)
The attacks were a crime that violated Islam's teaching on the sanctity of innocent life. But the response treated a whole faith as suspect: wars, torture, profiling, hate crimes and a media image of Islam as violent, felt by ordinary Muslims who had nothing to do with terrorism.
- Islam: The Straight Path — John L. Esposito, Oxford University Press
- U.S. Muslims Concerned About Their Place in Society, but Continue to Believe in the American Dream — Pew Research Center (2017)
- The World's Muslims: Religion, Politics and Society — Pew Research Center (2013)
The attacks were a crime against Islam and against Saudi Arabia, carried out by an organisation that had already declared war on the kingdom and whose leader had been stripped of his citizenship in 1994. Bin Laden deliberately chose Saudi hijackers to drive a wedge between Riyadh and Washington. Saudis were shocked to be seen as a nation of suspects, though many also came to agree that hardline preaching at home had helped create fertile ground for extremism.
- Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism since 1979 — Thomas Hegghammer, Cambridge University Press (2010)
- The 9/11 Commission Report — National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (2004)
- A History of Saudi Arabia (2nd edition) — Madawi Al-Rasheed, Cambridge University Press (2010)
Why it matters today
For Americans over about thirty, 9/11 is a "where were you" moment, a shared trauma that brought a brief, fierce unity. It reshaped everyday life (airport security, surveillance) and foreign policy, and the long, costly wars that followed left many Americans, on left and right, sceptical of foreign intervention.
For many Muslims, especially in the West, 9/11 split life into before and after. They were asked again and again to condemn attacks they had nothing to do with, faced surveillance and hostility, and watched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Most Muslims abhor al-Qaeda's violence, which also killed vast numbers of Muslims.
That fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi citizens is a lasting source of shame, anger and defensiveness for many Saudis. It strained the alliance with Washington, brought years of suspicion, lawsuits and visa scrutiny, and pushed the state to confront the militancy at home that al-Qaeda turned on the kingdom itself in 2003-04. Many Saudis resent being collectively blamed for the crimes of a group that also targeted them.