Fifteen minutes into Wayne Cox\u2019s first lecture of the year, a student ran through the door.<\/p>\n
It was Sept. 11, 2001. Cox, then a professor in Queen\u2019s Department of Political Studies, was teaching POLS 260, a full-year international relations course, when the late student interrupted him with news from New York.<\/p>\n
A plane had flown into the World Trade Center, the student told the room, and CNN was reporting a terrorist bombing.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I mean, you know, what am I supposed to say after that?\u201d Cox said in an interview with The Journal.<\/p>\n
About half the class left.<\/p>\n
Cox finished explaining the course expectations, opened the floor to questions, and tried to console the students who stayed.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut we really didn\u2019t know fully what was going on,\u201d Cox said.<\/p>\n
Twenty-five years later, Cox and four other members of the Queen\u2019s community spoke with The Journal about the day and what followed.<\/p>\n
Four were at Queen\u2019s on Sept. 11, 2001. The fifth was beginning university in Toronto and would later come to Queen\u2019s to teach and research religion and political violence.<\/p>\n
Their memories trace the questions that followed the attacks, the scrutiny directed at Muslim students and communities, the wars and security culture that came after, and how their understanding changed over the next 25 years.<\/p>\n
The morning of 9\/11<\/p>\n
Nicole Kain, Nurs \u201906, was living in residence at the time of the attacks. On the fourth floor of McNeil, students were crowded around the common-room television.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were watching the TV when the second plane hit the other tower. I will never forget that, I think, as long as I live,\u201d Kain said in an interview with The Journal.<\/p>\n
Across campus, Richard Ascough, who teaches religious studies at Queen\u2019s, was beginning a graduate seminar on apocalyptic literature and movements.<\/p>\n
That morning, one of Ascough\u2019s seminar students had a cousin who worked in the World Trade Center and didn\u2019t know whether he had gone to work that day. She later learned he hadn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
At the University of Toronto, Amarnath Amarasingam, who now teaches religion and political violence at Queen\u2019s, was in his first week as a university student. Someone brought a television into the quad, and a crowd gathered around it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think the initial question was always, was this an accident or was it not? And it wasn\u2019t until the second plane hit that it became clear,\u201d Amarasingam said in an interview with The Journal.<\/p>\n
David Haglund, who was teaching American foreign policy at Queen\u2019s that term, remembers walking out of Mackintosh-Corry and finding students who hadn\u2019t heard the news.<\/p>\n
\u201cI said, you know, something big has happened. It\u2019s going to change your future forever,\u201d Haglund said in an interview with The Journal.<\/p>\n
Haglund said the attacks were an extraordinary national trauma.<\/p>\n
He places them alongside other moments of profound shock in American history.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was obviously an emotionally disturbing event, which history has a collection [of], right?\u201d Haglund said. \u201c[But] was as it as emotionally disturbing as Pearl Harbor had been for the United States?\u201d<\/p>\n
A campus searching for answers<\/p>\n
Cox\u2019s course stopped following its outline almost immediately.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor those first three or four weeks, the course kind of turned into a current events course,\u201d Cox said.<\/p>\n
The following year, the class grew sharply. Cox said the first time he taught international relations to Queen\u2019s students, 88 students were enrolled. The year after 9\/11, POLS 260 had 400.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen 9\/11 happened, you know, the numbers tell everything,\u201d Cox said.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople were galvanized to world events based upon 9\/11,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Cox said crises may bring students into international relations, but following the news isn\u2019t enough.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou cannot turn your course into a course on just current events. You have to teach theories, and you have to teach, like, what is power and what is economics?\u201d Cox said.<\/p>\n
Religious studies saw a similar increase.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we saw after 9\/11 was an increase, a noticeable increase in the number of students taking courses on Islam, taking world religions,\u201d Ascough said.<\/p>\n
Ascough said students were enrolling because they wanted to understand Islam rather than condemn it.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was people that truly wanted to understand what this religion is,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean, it\u2019s unfortunate it takes an event like that to pull people into a course, right? Like, we would hope that people would want to,\u201d Ascough said.<\/p>\n
Kain\u2019s own questions changed too.<\/p>\n
She said she considered herself relatively well-informed before 9\/11 but had never heard of al-Qaeda and knew little about Afghanistan.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was all brand new, at least to me at the time,\u201d Kain said.<\/p>\n
Ascough said the interest he saw in his classrooms existed alongside the risk of blaming Muslims more broadly for the actions of a small subgroup of extremism-fueled terrorists.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople have a hard time separating particular acts by terrorists from the whole. It becomes a way of vilifying a whole group of people,\u201d Ascough said.<\/p>\n
Haglund heard similar concerns at a campus symposium shortly afterward, where students asked whether 9\/11 would bring \u201ca tide of Islamophobia\u201d and make university life increasingly difficult for Muslim students.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor a while, it [\u2026] kind of looked like that might happen,\u201d Haglund said.<\/p>\n
Cox said the wider political climate intensified those tensions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe environment was kind of a tinderbox for a long period of time, and people became quite polarized,\u201d Cox said.<\/p>\n
He pointed to the language used by then-U.S. President George W. Bush during the War on Terror.<\/p>\n
\u201cGeorge Bush was saying things like, you\u2019re either with us or you\u2019re with the terrorists. I mean, that\u2019s a polarizing tactic,\u201d Cox said.<\/p>\n
The polarization extended far beyond Queen\u2019s, Cox said, but the campus wasn\u2019t insulated from it.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou could feel it on campus,\u201d Cox said.<\/p>\n
The post-9\/11 world<\/p>\n
On his first flight to Europe after 9\/11, Haglund felt nervous and suspicious, full of fear of the possibility that someone could try to take control of the plane.<\/p>\n
\u201cBack then it was one of the first things in the immediate aftermath of 9\/11 that you had to have on your mind. What would I do?\u201d Haglund said.<\/p>\n
That fear became part of a broader security culture.<\/p>\n
Haglund said the new consciousness surrounding what became known as Homeland Security remains one of the clearest ways 9\/11 affects students who weren\u2019t alive for the attacks, particularly at airports and borders.<\/p>\n
The attacks also reshaped the field Amarasingam would enter.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut post-9\/11, it was all jihadism all the time, right? That was the only thing that anyone cared about,\u201d Amarasingam said.<\/p>\n
Over time, he watched the research broaden again.<\/p>\n
Scholars increasingly moved away from trying to identify a profile of the kind of person who becomes an extremist and toward tracing the different pathways that can bring people to violence.<\/p>\n
Amarasingam said the earlier emphasis on profiling had consequences. Muslim men who grew beards or became more religiously observant could be treated as suspicious.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s nothing kind of fundamental to Islam or being a conservative Muslim that automatically means that you\u2019re also sympathetic to terrorist groups,\u201d Amarasingam said.<\/p>\n
Researchers now examine common pathways across different ideologies, he said, rather than treating religion itself as the explanation.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s nothing special about religion that makes it any more conducive to radicalization than anything else,\u201d Amarasingam said.<\/p>\n
The way people encounter extremist movements changed too. Amarasingam said 9\/11 unfolded in a largely offline world, while relationships and communities built around extremist ideas can now develop largely or entirely online.<\/p>\n
Kain remembers the years after the attacks through fear rather than scholarship.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was just so much almost paralyzing fear, like fear of, well, now we can\u2019t travel on an airplane ever again because who knows if it\u2019ll be turned into a weapon,\u201d Kain said.<\/p>\n
She also remembers fearing another attack and worrying about how the U.S. would respond.<\/p>\n
Haglund remembers the international solidarity immediately after 9\/11 as real but brief.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe shock lasted a couple of weeks, maybe,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Then public attention moved from the attacks to the response. Haglund said Afghanistan began filling the news as focus shifted to the campaign against the Taliban.<\/p>\n
Cox also remembers the initial desire to help. Having previously lived and worked in New York, he watched the attacks knowing the streets around the World Trade Center.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I think every Canadian felt that and they wanted to do something,\u201d Cox said.<\/p>\n
He remains critical of how the War on Terror developed, but said the response also grew from solidarity.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can\u2019t forget the fact that it was motivated by a sense of community,\u201d Cox said.<\/p>\n
Twenty-five years later<\/p>\n
For Kain, the anniversary still reaches back to how abruptly that sense of safety disappeared.<\/p>\n
She described an \u201cinstant switch\u201d from generally feeling safe in the world to becoming more weary.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was literally like the day that the world changed,\u201d Kain said.<\/p>\n
Haglund said hindsight can also make the past appear more predictable than it was. He points to the First World War, whose causes remain debated after generations of scholarship, as an example of how difficult it can be to explain an event even after it happens.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe thing about the future is no one can foresee it. No one\u2019s been there,\u201d Haglund said.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust be alert to the power of contingency,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
For Cox, that uncertainty makes education more important.<\/p>\n
\u201cI came to the realization myself when I got the opportunity to go to university that ignorance or a lack of knowledge is often the root of most evil,\u201d Cox said.<\/p>\n
He said professors can\u2019t prepare students for every event they\u2019ll encounter, but they can give them tools that last beyond a particular crisis.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat you want to give them is the tools that they can carry with them for the rest of their lives, which is the intellectual curiosity to learn stuff,\u201d Cox said.<\/p>\n
Ascough approaches that responsibility from the classroom, where people with fundamentally different views must find a way to speak to each other.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t have to agree with you to be respectful of your opinion, but you can\u2019t just yell your opinion at me. You have to give evidence,\u201d Ascough said.<\/p>\n
That also means resisting explanations that make violence simpler than it is.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I want to avoid is single-issue kinds of things like, oh, religion causes war,\u201d Ascough said.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd so, we can\u2019t just have a single thing because then we\u2019ll be tricked into thinking we can solve it in a simplistic way,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Amarasingam\u2019s own effort to understand political violence eventually took him inside extremist movements. He has interviewed ISIS fighters who grew up in the West, went to school and university, and, in some cases, left spouses and children behind.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut then you talk to them, and they\u2019re just regular kids, right?\u201d Amarasingam said.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, it\u2019s like regular people, but they came to a place of believing that this was fundamentally something they needed to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trying to understand how they reached that point has sometimes brought accusations that Amarasingam is humanizing people who supported or committed violence.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s like understanding them is the point,\u201d he said. For Amarasingam, understanding isn\u2019t the same as excusing.\u201cIt\u2019s easy to be like, these guys are crazy, just ignore them,\u201d he said. \u201cBut actually, why did they leave Toronto to go to Syria?\u201d<\/p>\n
On the morning of Sept. 11, as the news kept arriving in Ascough\u2019s seminar, his class was trying to understand an act whose perpetrators they did not yet know.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, then we talked about how we imagine people would want to do this to other people, right?\u201d Ascough said.<\/p>\n
Amarasingam has spent much of the 25 years since studying versions of that question. His answer doesn\u2019t place the capacity for political violence entirely on the people he studies.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think any one of us put in the right conditions, in the right injustices, with the right framing of us versus them, can become a violent person, can very quickly dehumanize other people,\u201d Amarasingam said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese aren\u2019t like special people over here that are like genetically different from us,\u201d he said. \u201cEveryone has this capability and potential.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI think political violence and terrorism and extremism are the same,\u201d Amarasingam said. \u201cWe all have this capability; we just haven\u2019t been tested in the same way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Twenty-five years later, the five accounts leave unique answers about what 9\/11 changed, but none treat remembering it as an end in itself.<\/p>\n
Cox said the point of returning to tragedies like 9\/11 is to remember them \u201cwith the hope that they will never happen again.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cA part of what we should take away from this is that we\u2019re all in this together,\u201d Cox said, \u201cthat we should not default to the tactics of divide and hatred.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tags<\/p>\n
\n History<\/a>, Politics<\/a>, Remembrance<\/a>, September 11<\/a> <\/p>\n All final editorial decisions are made by the Editor(s) in Chief and\/or the Managing Editor. Authors should not be contacted, targeted, or harassed under any circumstances. If you have any grievances with this article, please direct your comments to eic@queensjournal.ca<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fifteen minutes into Wayne Cox\u2019s first lecture of the year, a student ran through the door. It was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":343934,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[881,9,24,63,87,122,124,123,32230,11803],"class_list":["post-343933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-history","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-politics","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news","tag-remembrance","tag-september-11"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=343933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343933\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/343934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=343933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=343933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=343933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}