Things to think about …
Things to think about arise from interesting articles, written by a variety of people from a variety of countries, who hold a variety of opinions.
Your point of view is welcome.
25 Years on …
Tanveer Ahmed is a Bangladeshi-born Australian psychiatrist, journalist, author, and former television presenter. In a recent article in the Weekend Australian Newspaper, he wrote of ‘Life as a Muslim, Post – 9/11’ in response to the enduring legacy of the September 11, terrorism and the unresolved question of belonging.
He said that for Muslim’s living in the West after the World Trade Centres were destroyed, their lives changed and became complicated. Their identity that had seemed largely private and cultural had become political. It became entangled with terrorism, immigration, foreign policy and the increasingly anxious question of whether Islam was compatible with Western politics.
A quarter of a century later, it is clear the attacks did not inaugurate the war on terror. They have helped trigger a much larger argument about immigration, multi-culturalism and national identity.
When we take Pauleen Hanson’s recent claim that she could not accept there were ‘good Muslims’ and Trump’s declaration that there should be a ‘total and complete shutdown’ on Muslims entering America, these policies are not defensible however they tap into a genuine anxiety whether large scale migration can be reconciled.
Ahmed described how the first response to the attacks on September 11 was military; Afghanistan was invaded within weeks, Iraq soon followed and Osama bin Laden was eventually killed; al-Qa’ida was degraded and the Islamic State caliphate ultimately destroyed.
These were genuine successes. Western intelligence became vastly better at detecting and disrupting terrorist plots and overcoming the scale of September 11 action. However, the broader war on terror demonstrated the limits of military power.
Afghanistan became a 20-year war that ended with the Taliban returning to power, while the invasion of Iraq destabilised the region and helped create the conditions in which Islamic State emerged. The expansion of surveillance and executive powers also raised enduring questions about civil liberties.
The West proved to be skilled at killing terrorists however less adept at defeating the ideas and ideologies that attracted them. Islamic State became adept at using social media to attract, recruit and radicalise people who may have never encountered a jihadist in the physical sense. This resulted in a threat that was less geographically dependent and more psychologically intimate.
The 2021 census recorded more than 813,000 Australian’s identifying as Muslims or 3.2 percent of the population, compared with about 282,000 in 2001. These demographics have implications for the character of the community.
The newer South Asian Muslim includes many students, professionals, business people and skilled migrants reflecting Australia’s highly selective migration policy. In many respects it’s more economically integrated and aspirational than some earlier refugee populations with implications for the risks around radicalisation.
Most Australian Muslims
Did not become terrorists.
They became Australian.
They went to work, raised families,
entered the professions and joined
the ordinary institutions of Australian life.
Their children acquired Australian accents and friends.
Twenty-five years on, the great legacy of September 11 is not just terrorism but the unresolved question of belonging. The attacks forced many Muslims in the West to think more deeply about what it meant to be Muslim, just as they forced Western societies to reconsider what they could reasonably expect from people who arrived from very different cultural and religious backgrounds.
The challenge for the next 25 years is whether liberal democracies can continue to absorb such differences while continuing to absorb such differences while sustaining a sufficiently strong sense of citizenship to bind people together. That cannot mean demanding cultural conformity or asking migrants to abandon where they came from, but neither can it mean allowing cultural differences to harden into permanent separation.
This article is an extracted from The Australian newspaper, September 12-13, 2026
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