Where were you on September 11th, 2001?
Where were you when your life changed?
*
I was eleven in 2001.
I dressed like a boy, which meant that I favored large sports jerseys that covered me, enveloped me like a shadow, my own spandex burqa.
Back then, my parents were poor. My dad liked being poor because he was an academic or whatever and my mom would bully him for his lack of industriousness or skill to gain capital. He liked reading books like a nerd and processing information through debate like Muslims in eighth-century salons speaking to Plato’s paradigms and the human tendency towards weak morals. It was what the Greeks did but with more flair. That’s my father’s lineage, it’s mine too, the long-forgotten Muslim polymath, the original renaissance man.
My father has told me that what he had most wanted was a quiet life of academic research, surrounded by the rustic bush of the outback where my mother could be close to nature’s rhythms. There was something sedated about suburban Australia in the 90s that I think he was drawn to, the mysterious charm of the spaciousness cities held back then, possibility, the air floating with the peppery scent of wattle, the disarming uniqueness of the flora and fauna.
We left the sedateness of Brisbane for Sydney’s newness in 2000 because of an Urban Planning lecturer position my dad took. But, after a year, he already wanted to return to the green pastoral landscapes of Brisbane’s wide expanse—the city silent, permanently in retreat, a reservoir to lost dreams. He had survived a civil war, as my mother had also, and immigrated to a country finally for peace. So, in early September 2001, when he was invited to a conference back in Brisbane, I think there was a part of him that wanted to return back to an old fraudulent idyllic life. We all went as a family for the closest thing to a holiday we were afforded and the entire time I remember resenting everything. I don’t remember much else other than that we stayed in a dark motel. So much of my life was contending with my mother’s rage in the interim of time, in the pockets, spaces, and corners of my life, so gathering memory is bringing all this lost time back to me. It’s funny that I don’t remember much about this trip but what I do remember is significant and clarifies on the morning of September 12th, 2001.
*
On the morning of the 12th, I was awakened early because we were driving back to Sydney, which was about a twelve-hour drive down south. I was awakened early from a dream, a nightmare really, so that we could be back on the road before the traffic and shrill heat hit the day. I tried to tell my mother about the nightmare, but we were all in hurry, and what often happens in families where there is dysfunction, the needs of children are often unmet. So I remember feeling frantically alone in my own delirium, re-running through my head what I had seen the night before. Mainly fire, that was it, but it was unsettling. There was something actually very unsettling about what I had seen, but I couldn’t voice it. So often I policed myself and told myself I was being dramatic so at that moment I reduced what I had seen to something of a distraction, a trick, of my own mind.
Within a few hours I had almost entirely forgotten what had happened. My parents were playing a mixture of old Tagore songs and every now and again I’d take my turn and play the entire run of Parachutes by Coldplay—which was obviously my favorite album of that time. I listened to these songs as I watched the barrels of green pool into pockets of brown, banana trees, the big pineapple, a parade of echidnas, sometimes a wombat crossing the street. I spent the twelve hours in my dream space portal. I was used to not being listened to, but that day something felt distinct, like an eruption in my body about what I had seen in my nightmare. No matter how much land passed between me and the vision, it stayed with me, coming back to me with clues. I could hear people screaming, I could see two steel birds… but what was going on?
This is of course what life was like before wifi, before you could type anything onto your phone and find answers. Around the halfway point of our journey my father wanted petrol, and me, his proxy son, went with him like a guard dog. By the time we were inside the petrol station I was already quietly perusing any potential snack I might coerce my father to buy when there was weird hysteria on the screen to which I heard him utter a deep guttural, “Oh my god.” He rarely spoke English in my presence back then, adamant that I speak to him in Bangla only, and so I was shocked by his own (rare) rule-breaking. That feeling was short-lived because I tracked his gaze to this screen. There was smoke everywhere, I didn’t know what was going on. I kept asking my dad, “Abbu, ki hoeche?” “Abbu, what happened?” Each time he didn’t answer me. It was an odd sensation of knowing something was changing. Something about the smoke reminded me of my nightmare.
For the rest of the journey, my father was in a silent haze. Moved only by the possibility of finding a radio signal. By the time we got closer to Sydney, he had retrieved one, and by then, the deep heaviness had arrived. Like when something is so painful you suspend yourself in breathless motion. We knew they were Muslim. We knew they were Muslim. We didn’t know the entire details yet, so much of the information was delayed, journalists in complete disarray, but we knew they were Muslim. And. I didn’t know why I knew, I just knew I knew. Nothing would ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever ever be the same again.
*
I was already Islamophobic by eleven, which I believed existed (ah duh) in all of us waaaaaaaaaaay before 9/11. Finding out the first Muslims in America came in slave ships was a humbling moment of realizing the legacy of anti-Blackness + Islamophobia, and how anti-Moorish sentiments were prominent in the destruction of the Muslim world. Let’s not forget the Crusades and how the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Christendom was the very beginning chess move of colonization. Yet, even though the history of Islamophobia is deep and prominent, the tipping point happened in September 2001. This is the moment where the mythology of hatred that has been created about Muslims—and sustained and executed by the Western, Christian world—was finally rearing its ugly head. We were finally seeing the inglorious impact and reaction to Western imperialism.
What else is Muslim terrorism but a response? Whether you like it or not, whether you think we are devils or your saviors our “history” and the brutality our people have succumbed to is not removed or distinct from the West’s callous and violent impact. Isn’t it curious to all of us learned and intelligent people that terrorism is a modern construct? When you try and understand a disaster, a murder, don’t you want to see all the connecting dots?
*
The history of the Saudi connection to America, the neo-liberalism and hyper-Capitalism of many of these Arab nation-states whose revolutions were bought, sedated (or both) by Americans is a crude example of how any nation can be bid for a price and a timely reminder that we need leaders who actually care about us and see us more than just pawns in a video game.
Osama Bin Laden was nothing but a human drone strike in a game he was destined to lose, but with conceit, he believed he was a liberator, despite his own close connections to the U.S. In 1997, speaking to the Soviet-Afghan War, an American-backed war, he told a British journalist, “I felt outraged that an injustice had been committed against the people of Afghanistan,” which is why he first dedicated help to the Mujahideen resistance in the late 70s. Reportedly, two million Afghans died during that war. This means that the conservative death toll of Afghans in the last few decades (since 1979 and until now) is bordering on three million. All this, because of America. I can’t help but think in cycles — 1979 was also the year that Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Iranian Revolution, instilled an authoritarian, fundamentalist government, ousting the legacy of a civilization that was thousands of years old with an exaggerated militancy. Isn’t it interesting, then, with all its military might, a country like America, with the promise of its democracy, can invade a country for over four decades and still not, er, end terrorism? Lol. An interesting conundrum. Then—take note— this year the Taliban gained control over Afghanistan, which was the very reason it was invaded in the first place. All year I’ve kept repeating the last part of the famous quote Thomas More writes in Utopia, “…but that you first make criminals and then punish them.” But that you first make terrorists, then get your SWAT team to execute them.
The life of someone like Bin Laden is partly the story of an avenger of his people— but mainly he was an avenger of his own ego. If Cheney and Rumsfeld were finally living some sick “Operation Orientalism” fantasy by invading Iraq and Afghanistan during the so-called “War on Terror” then what is also clear is that these men, much like Bin Laden, were fighting wars for themselves and their own egos, masking the battle in a charade of liberation. But liberation for whomst? Are the American people free? Are the Afghan people? The Iraqi people? How about the population of roughly three million incarcerated folks who are in jail for marijuana charges, while states begin to legalize weed and white-owned companies make fucking THC gummies for $35 a pack? Are they free? I’ve always wondered if America, the gaslighting queen of nation-states, ever wondered how its lack of integrity as a country impacts the way the rest of the world acts. You can’t be a bully and expect everybody else will play nice.
But I guess that’s what white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy breed. Total and utter denial.
*
I left New York a week ago, leaving my home to come to rest safely with some of my friends, which meant that today, the twentieth year anniversary of 9/11, I just happened to be in a home full of queer Muslims, my brethren, my people.
I think until very recently most Muslims I knew carried an immense inexplicable shame after September 11th, a shame that has shrouded and silenced us. My whole life, though, it was also a confused silence — why was my faith, the God that had saved me time and time again, why was that God being laughed at, castigated? Why were my people so unprotected in this world?
I love being Muslim. I love the history of my people, all of our histories. How we are some of the most dynamic people in the world, the most diverse, and how we are still here, after everything that has been taken from us, and still being taken from us, we are still here. There’s so much I love about being Muslim, the way we prostrate to God in unison, the way our mosques are sites of healing and mercy, the way La illaha il Allah will always strike something so deep within me, enough for me to pierce the words on my skin so that I’m in constant daily reverence.
But I am also a Muslim who has been constantly questioned about her Muslimness, whether by other Muslims or non-Muslims. I have lost a lot in the path of trying to stand in my truth, and as a public unconventional Muslim I don’t think people realize how much I open myself up as a target. But I write for kids like me. Queer, trans, and non-binary Muslims, for us, the outliers, the ones that were forced to lose God. That were forced to think we couldn’t we access God.
That’s what I remember today, on the twentieth year anniversary of 9/11—that nobody can take being Muslim away from me, that my faith is mine, and it is between me and God. All those years ago, that nightmare still pulses in the ether. Now I trust my dreams, that’s what it means to be a seer. To believe in your voice and cultivate a frequency close to the divine. In Tarot, the Tower means ending systems, the status quo, it means utter and complete collapse. “I circle around God, around the primordial tower,” Asiya Wadud writes. “I’ve been circling for thousands of years and I still don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?” There’s a deep symbolism to falling towers.
My prayer, twenty years later, is that we learn from our mistakes and that we understand demonization is not the way forward. My prayer is that we open our hearts to love. That we accept and honor our differences. That we understand that our path is together. So we need to learn to work together. To protect each other. Especially the most vulnerable and unprotected amongst us. This means some of us have to forgo power, this Earth is calling for reparations. Don’t let them divide us, don’t let them tell us not to forget when they forget us every day. We can’t forget ourselves, our humanity, in this, but that means seeing everybody’s humanity as equal.
There’s healing here. Inshallah, there is healing here.
Take care of your hearts today, tomorrow is a new day toward revolution.
Hello! I will be dedicating funds from my newsletter to Last Exit Kabul this entire month so PLEASE donate directly or sign up to become a paid subscriber (or Venmo or PayPal me) and know your $$ is going to me as well as this beautiful iniative that was started to help house and aid Afghan folks through the process of leaving Afghanistan toward safety. May Allah protect them.
Thank you Fariha for your words! Love Respect and Peace blend in between Muslims and Hindus and Catholics and all faiths We are all bothers and sisters under the same Light of days and nights