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In the aftermath of the jihad attacks in Washington D.C. and New York City on September 11, 2001, many thousands of Americans — even millions — became sensitized to the issue of Islam.
Most of us had never thought that much about it before. Muslims were just strangely-dressed foreigners, not particularly distinguishable from Hindus or Sikhs. We were vaguely aware that their exotic customs were related to their religion, but that’s where our knowledge ended. We regarded them with that vague, well-intended, but ill-informed tolerance that is a part of the American character.
![WTC jumpers](http://chromatism.net/current/images/wtcjumping.jpg)
Starting on the afternoon of 9/11/2001, a large number of Americans became interested in learning more about Islam. A few days later George W. Bush managed to lull some of them back into somnolence with his reassurances about the “religion of peace”, but others resisted such bland platitudes. Disregarding the official line on Islam, they looked more deeply into the history and teachings of Mohammed and his successors. Websites were established, non-profit resistance organizations were formed, and what is now called the Counterjihad took shape.
Ten years on, the number of dedicated anti-jihad information warriors has dwindled, perhaps by an order of magnitude or more. The remaining activists, however, are well-informed and committed to the cause.
![WTC jumper](http://chromatism.net/current/images/jumper3.jpg)
What happened on September 11th generated what might be called a “9-11 consciousness” in those who were susceptible. People who stared at the screen all day and through the evening, and watched the horrific replays over and over into the wee hours of the morning. Who woke up the next day to the smoking heap of rubble. Who saw the smoldering gap in the Pentagon and the crater in Pennsylvania. Who watched the holes at Ground Zero take shape over the following months.
People with 9-11 consciousness never let go of the idea that something dangerous and demonic was loose in the world. They now recognized a force for evil that most of them had not noticed previously. From then on, however, they knew that they would have to resist it and push it back into the dark lands where it originated.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *For some people, 9-11 consciousness began long before September 11th, 2001.
Bat Ye’or, for example, had been warning for years about the danger of Islam in Europe. Andrew McCarthy, the prosecutor of the terrorists who made the first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center in 1993, was at least eight years ahead of most people in his awareness of what was happening.
9-11 consciousness was first awakened in me thirty years ago, when I read
Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey by V.S. Naipaul. When I finished it, I told Dymphna: “In twenty or thirty years we’re going to be at war with Islam. It can’t be avoided; the true believers will not be willing to co-exist with us.”
My awareness of what was coming lay dormant for twenty years, awakening briefly from time to time. The CIA funding and training the mujahideen of Afghanistan itched at my mind, and a little voice told me, “This doesn’t seem like such a good idea in the long run.” Then the first attack on the World Trade Center, and Khobar Towers, and the embassy bombings in Africa, and the attack on the
U.S.S. Cole. Each of these was a reminder of what V.S. Naipaul had written.
That beautiful, awful September day reactivated my 9-11 consciousness permanently, but it was V.S. Naipaul who started it all back in 1981.
Mr. Naipaul is an atheist from Trinidad, but his family background is Hindu. No group has suffered more from the murderous depredations of Islam than the Hindus of the Indian subcontinent, so his approach to the writing of his book lacked any illusions about the “religion of peace”.
The author began his journey in Iran just after the Islamic Revolution, in 1979. He spent some time with mullahs and the ayatollahs as well as ordinary citizens, listening to what they had to say and trying to understand them on their own terms. He then traveled to other parts of the Islamic world in the Middle East and South Asia, studying the Islamic revival in both its Sunni and Shi’ite variants.
He concluded that Islam’s great awakening was a result of the confluence of Islam, oil money, and the revolutionary ideologies of the 20th century. Out of this toxic mix emerged a hybrid that was peculiar to our time and unique in the history of Islam. In the final paragraph of his book, V.S. Naipaul wrote:
The life that had come to Islam had not come from within. It had come from outside events and circumstances, the spread of the universal civilization. It was the late twentieth century that had made Islam revolutionary, given new meaning to old Islamic ideas of equality and union, shaken up static or retarded societies. It was the late twentieth century — and not the faith — that could supply the answers — in institutions, legislation, economic systems. And, paradoxically, out of the Islamic revival, Islamic fundamentalism, that appeared to look backward, there would remain in many Muslim countries, with all the emotional charge derived from the Prophet’s faith, the idea of modern revolution. Behzad the communist (to whom the Russian rather than the Iranian revolution was “the greatest turn in history”) was made by Islam more than he knew. And increasingly now in Islamic countries there would be the Behzads, who, in an inversion of Islamic passion, would have a vision of a society cleansed and purified, a society of believers.
Iran was not the only country where revolutionary communism influenced jihad doctrine, and the Shi’ites were not the only sectarians thus affected.