Local Media Representations of Islam before 9/11

Local Media Representations of Islam before 9/11

11 September is the date on which Salavador Allende was overthrown as the democratically elected president of Chile (1973), on which my pet dog was born (1995) and many other things besides. Yet that date has come to stand for one event in one year: the hijacking and crashing of four aeroplanes in the United States in 2001. That date/event is now routinely shortened to 9/11, reflecting the American form in which the month is placed before the day, and alluding to the telephone number for emergency services in the US. It is also styled ‘the day the world changed’, placing it on an almost incomparably higher level than any other disaster or atrocity, such as the London bombings on 7 July 2005. But was it really the day the world changed? Certainly, it changed for those who were directly affected by it, but global politics has continued to be guided by the same principles, such as the doctrine of national self-interest and the practice of American hegemony. So was there a new fear of Islam, particularly in its ‘radical’ or ‘fundamentalist’ guises? The argument of this chapter is that nothing changed in that respect either. Ultimately, one is led to conclude that the only new thing to have emerged as a consequence of 9/11 is the conviction that the world has changed, nothing else.

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