September 11, 2001...

I can remember where I was on 9/11, twenty years ago: sat on my sofa in Hebden Bridge, unable to tear myself away from the TV screen. The TV coverage was graphic, mesmeric. When a plane ploughed into the Pentagon, I felt sure the White House would be next. Having gone to work as usual that September morning, thousands of people were faced with an unimaginable choice: confronting a raging inferno or jumping from one of the upper floors of the World Trade Centre. In the days that followed we learned that 3,000 people had perished, comprising non-combatants from thirty different nations. This wasn’t an attack on the World Trade Centre, or America, or ‘the west’; it seemed, at that moment, like an attack on humanity itself.     

Commentators questioned why well-educated people (most of the hijackers were college educated and middle class; eight of them were engineers) should have taken over the controls of civil aircraft, to kill the passengers, crew, thousands of other people and themselves. We were forced to confront the hijackers’ implacable faith: the belief that they were doing the will of God, their God. It takes a true believer to embrace a martyr’s death. The victims, in contrast, worshipped one God, or another God; some acknowledged no God at all; many of them were Muslims. Though they might have prayed to their God for deliverance from that existential nightmare, their prayers went unanswered…