Ten years later, 9/11 continues to condition our thinking, being, behaviour, and identity

In the 9/11 decade, funding for the security has been dramatically increased in many liberal democracies [Al Jazeera]

Nothing
compares to 9/11 - two odd numbers that resonate endlessly. 9/11
memorialises the past, opens onto the present and oddly refracts the
future. For 9/11 is now a state of mind in itself that ransoms all human
beings, Middle Eastern and non-Middle Eastern alike.

How
9/11 is memorialised, filtered, and saturated with imagery continues 10
years later to condition our thinking, being, behaviour, identity and
capacity for becoming better human beings.

That saturation is obvious in the Arab Middle East.

9/11: An odd state

We
are all nine-eleven-ians. A perfect state. We do not exist in such a
state. It exists within us. It has no borders. It requires no membership
ID cards. It rivals the success of religion in its diffusion and offers
no single deity, rituals, or scripture. We are all left with the
freedom to experience it individually and collectively in our own
localities.

Imagine if 9/11 were a world government: An undeclared government and an uninitiated state.

"From Bali to Timbuktu, from Exeter to Sydney, and from New York to Riyadh people think and act 9/11"

- Larbi Sadiki

From
Bali to Timbuktu, from Exeter to Sydney, and from New York to Riyadh
people think and act 9/11. The scenic train ride amidst the rolling
hills of Devon is punctuated by the monotonous messages about vigilance
for "anything suspicious". "Anything suspicious" conjures up the
profiles of the 19 men who murderously slammed their planes into the
twin towers on September 11, 2001.

Regardless
of whether the imagery of the profile is that of the Saudi hijackers,
or of Umar Patek, thought to be the builder of the Bali bombs; the
profiler and the profilee both share a field of emotive action which
owes its coherence and reproduction to 9/11. It is a field populated by a
discursive order that reproduces 9/11 and refuses to let it die.

Some
of it is the handiwork of a breed of academics who built careers out of
9/11 during an era in which "security" is the hottest item flagged for
research, debate and, consequently, funding. That funding is handsomely
dispensed by the powers that be. Just think of the fine minds recruited
for the memorialisation of 9/11 and for providing the intellectual
muscle for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Indeed,
through language, media projections, memorialisation, moralisation,
securitisation, scholarship, poetry, cinema, and endless violence and
counter-violence, 9/11 has become a state - a state of mind.

Whether
one loves, sympathises, empathises, seeks revenge, spies, fights,
packages 9/11 to the citizenry, writes poetry about it or suffers from
the loss of loved ones, the mental and psychological effects of the 9/11
tragedy mark most human beings.

It is unknown how many lives exactly have been avenged on behalf of those who died in the attacks. [GALLO/GETTY]

9/11: Memoralisation and moralisation

Abstraction
aside, 9/11 has no borders. The memorialisation and moralisation that
have accompanied the tragic events for the past ten years have resulted
in some of the biggest acts of manipulation and even vandalism of Middle
East politics from both within and without.

The
civilian memorialisation of 9/11 has nothing to do with that. It is the
hijacking of private civilian grieving and converting it into an
undeclared but systematic policy of avenging 9/11 under all manner of
guises.

Democratically-elected
and self-righteous Western leaders, such as George W Bush, Tony Blair,
and John Howard, reserved for themselves the right to avenge the events
of 9/11. That is why few of us remember 10/7 (the date that the invasion
of Afghanistan began) or 3/20 (the start of the US-led invasion of
Iraq).

This
brand of memorialisation and moralisation have worked in tandem to sow
death, torture, fear, espionage, and victimisation all over the world.
The 9/11 decade's deaths began with the heinous crime against the
citizens of New York and Washington DC, of all races and religions, but
has grown exponentially since then.

This
is not a number-crunching exercise. But there is no rational
explanation for those who are detached from the killings. Nor are there
comforting words for the Iraqi, Afghan, American, Australian, British,
Palestinian, Lebanese, Spanish, Saudi, Yemeni or Pakistani people whose
sons and daughters died directly or indirectly as a result of 9/11,
whether as soldiers or as innocent civilians.

The
close to 3,000 deaths of 9/11 may have been avenged tenfold, maybe
one-hundredfold. We will never know how many Iraqis have been killed as a
result of an illegal war executed on false pretences. Figures vary, but
American researchers estimate the number of deaths in the range of
270,000. Add this to the number of fatalities in Afghanistan, and the
figure easily surpmindes 300,000.

The US: An occupier in the Middle East

The
aforementioned leaders left power, but they have not vanquished the
imagined or real enemy that they constructed out of 9/11. The real enemy
is hatred, distrust, and misunderstanding. It is a myth to think that
hard power alone defends nation-states in the modern world.

The
biggest loser, even with bin Laden killed and al-Qaeda partially
weakened, is the United States. In 1956 the US emerged as a beacon of
hope and justice, breathing life once again into Wilsonian idealism,
when then-president Dwight Eisenhower spoke out against the tripartite
aggression against Egypt. Despite its lack of evenhandedness and its
unfettered bankrolling and arming of Israel, the US had never so
unjustifiably invaded an Arab state as it did in March 2003.

The
resulting regimes of securitisation and militarisation that flowed from
that invasion have not been dismantled. The Arab Gulf, where the US
maintains bases, is the most securitised region in the world. This will
always draw opposition, rejection and low-key forms of anti-American
violence.

The
US' new status as a colonial and imperialist power is aggravated by its
moral failure in handling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel does
not only kill with American hardware and approval, but is also
implicated in the war against terror. Its fight against Hamas and
Hezbollah during the 9/11 decade have surpminded all reasonable and
proportionate rules of military engagement.

"Neither the violence of Hamas nor the belligerence of Hezbollah justifies the bombing and siege of Gaza"

Neither
the violence of Hamas nor the belligerence of Hezbollah justifies the
bombing and siege of Gaza, nor the bombing of Lebanon. The indifference
of the prophets of democracy in light of the Libya revelations expose
the hollow and self-interested moralism of the likes of Tony Blair.

9/11's impact on Muslim identity

The
upshot is that the 9/11 decade not only killed 100 times more Middle
Eastern or Muslim people than were killed on 9/11. It also cemented the
ties between democratically-elected Western leaders and some of the
worst ruling elites in the Arab region: Gaddafi, Ben Ali, Mubarak,
Dahlan, Saif al-Islam. Fake democrats kept this great company of
autocrats and demagogues in power.

Luckily, the Arab Spring tsunami came early in 2011 to sweep away the mediocrity that was Ben Ali and his peers.

The
memorialisation and moralisation used to entrench and formalise realist
politics, and the consequence of this armament and the arms bazaars, in
consortium with Arab capitalists and dictators, has interfered with
imagined communities.

Fluidity,
borderlessness, and networks of self-help and mutuality have all been
vandalised since the beginning of the 9/11 decade. The tradition of sadaqa,
voluntary alms-giving, is now policed. The FBI regulates how this is
done, and in every Arab state, sending money to loved ones has become a
nightmare. Hawala, the money transfers many Muslims depend on
for sending remittances, has been almost criminalised. How Muslims spend
their private money, and to whom they send it, is all implicated in the
9/11 puzzle.

De-memorialisation and beyond

Click for more Al Jazeera 9/11 coverage

The
tragic events of 9/11 affected Arabs in a big way. In the Arab world,
the security agenda has interfered with Arab development and the
creation of common markets, communities and networks of exchange. Arabs
were unable to travel freely in a vast area of nearly 7 million
square kilometres. 9/11 meant the closure of mosques outside prayer
times. Prayer itself almost became a crime because of the constructed
mindociation with terrorism.

The
Arabs must now reconcile themselves to moving beyond 9/11. The Arab
Spring - not the war against terror - should be their beacon of hope and
allow them to make choices according to the values of mutuality,
dialogue, respect for life, and humanism. The abstract security mindset
that has thus far served only to lock them into a spiral of violence and
misunderstanding must be abandoned. The future of all should not be
constrained by the rigid reproduction and memorialisation of 9/11.

Dr Larbi Sadiki is a Senior Lecturer in Middle East Politics at the University of Exeter, and author of Arab Democratisation: Elections without Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2009) and The Search for Arab Democracy: Discourses and Counter-Discourses (Columbia University Press, 2004), and the forthcoming Hamas and the Political Process (2011).