Do we find ourselves thinking within a different political imaginary, constantly being reminded of the events of 9/11, as we were again on Christmas Day 2009 with the failed attempt to detonate a bomb on a plane as it was landing in Detroit, having crossed the Atlantic from Amsterdam? A young Nigerian man who had been associated with Al-Qaida in Yemen was captured on the flight and days later Obama went on national television in the USA to remind people of 9/11 and the need for enhanced vigilance against terror. Has 9/11 proved itself to be a seminal traumatic event, as least in the West, in redefining the political landscape of fear and terror? Has it meant that citizens are obliged to live with a sense of uncertainty, not knowing where and how Al-Qaida might strike next? It seems to transmute as it spreads across Asia, and more recently Africa, not as a discrete organization but as an idea taken up by different movements, so people feel haunted by a fear of not knowing where the risks of terror will come from and what terrifying future they could bring.

How have these global landscapes of fear been affected by the death of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan a few months before people were to gather at Ground Zero to mark the passing of a decade since 9/11? Does this call for a fundamental shift in the terms of social and political theory if we are to illuminate the everyday realities that many people now feel obliged to live with? Even as the grip of Al-Qaida seems to have been loosening in its appeal with the events of the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011 and the widespread appeal of democratic movements against authoritarian regimes long supported by the US and Western powers, it also seems to make its presence felt in the bloody conflicts that continue in a Libya freed from Colonel Gaddafi and in the struggles against Bashar al-Assad’s rule in Syria.

9/11 was an event that was never supposed to happen: even if Hollywood could imagine the scene of civilian planes being flow into the Twin Towers, an iconic image that represented the global power of the USA, the reality was beyond reason and imagination. When Derrida asks ‘What is a traumatic event?’, he recognizes that we must also ‘rethink the temporalization it seems to imply if we want to comprehend in what way “September 11” looks like a “major event”’. This is because we have learnt with Freud to place trauma within a past that insists on making itself felt in the present. But with 9/11, as Derrida insists, ‘the wound remains open by our terror before the future and not only the past ... if it is the present or the past, it is only insofar as it bears on its body the terrible sign of what might or perhaps will take place, which will be worse than anything that has ever taken place’ (Borradori, 2003, pp. 96–7, emphasis in original).¹

If it was a sense of future that was to be disturbed, it also worked to shake the sense of security that had been taken for granted within the USA with the ending of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was to signal the threats of a new, possibly more dangerous enemy as it transformed the ways ‘the West’ was to imagine itself in relation to radical jihadi movements within Islam.² The immediate shock was difficult to live with and, as so often happens, it returned people to habitual patterns as it closed down the possibilities of thinking differently. For a while at least, particularly in the USA, the state of shock gripped intellectual and cultural life, and it became difficult to imagine different theoretical and practical responses to new forms of global terror. It was as if distance was necessary and as if separation could be useful to think about these unfolding events. I was trying to make sense of what was going on in London through writing day to day in the hope that distance might allow for different ways of coming to terms with the shock. I traced the events as people were finding words that seemed helpful, even if they felt inadequate to express the unfolding horrors.

As Audrey J. Marcus, Programs Coordinator at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, told the Columbia Center for Oral History in its 11 September 2001 Oral History Project: ‘What is amazing is that in that moment, there was a moment before – that we saw that plane, that second plane – and there was a moment after, and it’s like two different worlds, those two moments. I mean, literally, I can feel like I can remember the exact second when the whole world changed’ (New York Times, 11 September 2011).

Somehow it is the scene of the falling bodies, falling people that seemed so shocking and somehow dwelt in the mind as an image that returned as people watched the endless documentaries that were made about that day, to be shown again in the days leading up to the anniversary marking a decade since 9/11. For some it was the terrible sound of the falling bodies hitting the ground that remains so traumatic and shocking. People remember through different senses as they struggle to make sense of what unfolded before their eyes as an impossible sight.

At the same time, soon after 9/11, distributors of popular culture began voluntarily recalling, rescheduling and retooling their products out of sensitivity to the tragedy. Promotions for Spiderman: The Movie, featuring Spiderman swinging between the World Trade Center towers, were pulled, as were those for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Collatoral Damage. The Tom Clancy video game Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2, whose plot involved the ‘take down’ of the Pentagon and World Trade Center, was removed from stores within minutes of the attacks because its cover depicted the World Trade Center towers in smoking ruins. At the same time, filmmakers of Zoolander digitally erased the Twin Towers from the background, while sitcoms set in New York – namely Friends and Sex and the City – stopped using expository shots of the towers to transition between scenes.

What could not possibly be happening ‘because no fire trucks have even pulled up yet’ was happening in ways that were beyond reason. These terrible things did happen and our lives could not be controlled and made safe in the manner that New Yorkers had taken for granted. They were vulnerable and were to feel what many others in the rest of the world had always known. As Jason Burke recalled in The 9/11 Wars, the 9/11 attacks provoked ‘horror, shock, genuine sympathy’ among Muslims everywhere. These feelings, however, were ‘mixed with a strong sense that the attacks were, if not legitimate in themselves, justified by the alleged misdeeds of America and Americans over recent decades’.

Often, this served to delegitimate alternative traditions of Judaism and Islam within Abrahamic traditions that became excluded from philosophy and thus taught within departments of religion and theology alone. Religion within the terms of an Enlightenment modernity was framed as a matter of individual belief and so exclusively a concern of private life. Though this might have made sense of societies that enforced a clear separation between state and religion, partly established through revolutionary traditions in the USA and France, it often made it difficult to appreciate how religious traditions were at work in shaping people’s relationships to bodies, desires and sexualities, even though they have difficulties in acknowledging this. As Antonio Gramsci appreciated, ‘common sense’ is often fractured and carries historical traces that people can be slow to acknowledge. People learn to disavow the histories they carry and the ways in which they express themselves unknowingly in the present.⁴

The distinction established in the late twentieth century between modern and postmodern theories or between ‘solid’ and ‘liquid’ modernities have themselves often been set within the terms of an Enlightenment modernity that had assumed that, with time, religious belief was to give way to secular reason, as faith remained largely a form of irrationality. But with a widespread ‘turn to religion’, even where this has manifested itself in concerns with spiritualities that go beyond established religious frameworks, notions of secularization as an inevitable consequence of industrialization have had to be questioned. We could no longer assume that religious belief was a sign of ‘backwardness’ and that faith would inevitably give way as a result of the progress of reason and science.

The relationships were more complex than positivisms had allowed, so that we needed to rethink and question the ways in which positivisms continue to shape much philosophy and social theory. Issues of belief have to be approached differently if we are to be able to open up conversations between different civilizations. We had to engage yet again, but in different ways, with both the promises and the threats of modernity that could no longer be so easily conceived in universal terms if different cultures and traditions were to be respected and heard in their difference(s). This was to acknowledge that ‘universalism’ has been largely framed through a Christian Pauline tradition and thus through a disdain and contempt for Jewish and Islamic traditions that would be deemed ‘tribal’ or ‘particularistic’.

It is these terms of supremacy of a European secularized modernity that did so much to legitimate colonial occupation and rule of colonized ‘others’ who were deemed to be uncivilized. These were to be treated like children in need to authority and control. Inherited rationalist traditions of philosophy and social theory need to be questioned if more meaningful conversations are to be created across cultures and civilizations....