Twin blasts heard around the globe

Exactly a decade ago today, explosions a few minutes apart in a city in North America carried with them ominous winds that would subsequently fan across many continents. A new era was born and with it followed death and destruction.

I was in Jeddah at the time, transfixed by the images of the twin towers slowly collapsing into a heap of rubble before my eyes, universal symbols of American wealth and power disappearing forever in less than 60 minutes.

The US reacted as it knew best. Afghanistan was the first to fall under fire. The US president avowed then that he would weed out the terrorists whose complicity in the events of September 11 was assuredly genuine as he kept repeating to his shell-shocked constituents. Civilians were captured, hooded and then whisked to an island concentration camp many of us had not heard of before: Guantanamo!

Iraq, the evil empire, then came to the fore. Weapons of mass destruction flashed across domestic media screens, or were plastered across headlines of US tabloids with their messages of impending doom. America was under threat of another imminent attack. More words started creeping into our vocabulary. Shock and awe, anthrax, Al Qaida, WMDs; words that succeeded in paralysing the thinking process of many in the US government as their president pushed forward on his crusade.

And while George W Bush was riding high on his adventures, undoubtedly helped by the glowing columns of print and screen accounts by media personnel we later came to find out were discreetly being paid by his government, the butcher of Sabra and Shatilla was busy pursuing his own agenda of ethnic cleansing against the citizens of the Occupied Territories.

Ariel Sharon, whose army carried out a series of savage and brutal attacks on innocent civilians and primarily towards women and children to carry forth his message of terror was rewarded by several visits to the White House by Bush for his statesmanship and efforts to promote the concept of the war between civilisations, that of Islam against the West.

Islam took a massive hit in those early days from those bent on portraying this religion as one of terror and mayhem. And to an extent they succeeded in shaping the minds of many who chose to remain ignorant. It wasn’t long before western media turned its attention towards Saudi Arabia, the home of 15 of the 19 hijackers allegedly taking part in the assault on America. The country, until the events of September 11, was perceived as a closed kingdom with very little contact with foreigners except in the way of economic interests. There was no tourism and very little in the way of cultural exchanges.

Suddenly hordes of western journalists and media organisations descended upon this desert land in search of clues and answers. Every aspect of Saudi life came under fire; the schools, the curriculum, treatment of women, and our clerics with their interpretation of Islam.

The Saudis initially were disinterested participants. There was a sense of denial in the notion that the attacks in New York were in anyway linked to organisations whose soldiers may have been born and bred in this country. And it remained that way until some of those misfits turned on their host country with a series of bombings and killings of civilians in the major cities of Jeddah, Riyadh and Dhahran.

The indiscriminate targeting of innocent people led to an awakening that there was indeed a malady within that had to be addressed immediately. The kingdom’s war on terror began with harsh action against those involved. Those not killed were arrested and sentenced to death for their complicity in these crimes.

Public service messages against the dangers of extremism were heard or seen everywhere. Schoolbooks were reviewed for sections that could be inferred as sowing discord between faiths. Women found some solace in a little loosening of the restrictions placed on their professional freedom.

King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz addressed the nation with a commitment of his government’s war on the fundamentalism and ideology, the essential nutrients that nurture extremism and terrorism. The Saudi minister of interior publicly stated that the government’s battle against extremism would broaden its scope against those clerics and shaikhs guilty of spreading their militant messages among the youth, and directing young minds towards the path of intolerance and violence.

The Saudi Council of Ministers exhorted the media and other cultural agencies within the kingdom to play a pivotal role in the country’s campaign to rid itself of extremist ideologies. The kingdom in recognising the dangers of radical fanaticism to our society publicly launched a zero-tolerance drive to rid itself of the threat posed by those spreading the message of ‘takfir’, which stamps anyone not following their interpretations of Islam as non-Muslims.

And to bridge the gap between faiths, in a historic first the custodian of the two holy mosques met with the symbolic father figure of the Roman Catholic Church at the Vatican. Among the topics covered was the value of collaboration between Christians, Muslims, and Jews for promoting peace. There has been some progress at grass-roots level.

Saudi-American relations which took a severe beating for much of the decade, marked by hostility and mistrust had slowly began to warm up once the realisation dawned that they were both fighting a common enemy, extremism on both sides of the equation.

What a difference a decade makes. The course of actions that the US chose to take following that fateful day has resulted in near economic collapse to the once mighty dollar. Fading admiration for the American way of life and justice coupled with the rise of the new economic superpower China, closely followed by India has led to a loss of the glitter of its invincibility.

Meanwhile for the rest of us, life must go on.

Tariq A. Al Maeena is a Saudi socio-political commentator. He lives in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.