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Reviewed by:
  • Understanding September 11, and: Critical Views of September 11: Analyses from around the World
  • Lawrence Jones (bio)
Craig Calhoun, Paul Price, and Ashley Timmer , eds., Understanding September 11 (New York: New Press, 2002), 454 pp.
Eric Hershberg and Kevin W. Moore, eds., Critical Views of September 11: Analyses from around the World (New York: New Press, 2002), 290 pp.

The origin of these two volumes, conceived of and coordinated by the Social Science Research Council, was an innovative Web site that that organization set up in the weeks following the September 11 attacks. Interpretive essays were solicited from scholars throughout the world, then posted on the Web site, where they were read by a great number of people who sought more nuanced and complex views of the tragedy than those provided by either mass-market media or government officials. Selected authors were then invited to refine and expand their selection for the print volumes, published on the first-year anniversary of the events. The resulting volumes demonstrate the promise of using intellectual labors to inform a public consensus too quickly reached. Yet the books also illustrate the wide disagreements within (and limitations of) scholarly communities as they struggle to place current events into deeper contexts.

Understanding September 11, the stronger of the two volumes, includes twenty-four essays subdivided into five sections. An essay by Robert Hefner, in the section on Islamic radicalism, provides historical perspective on the mid-twentieth-century decline of secular nationalist movements in the Middle East, as well as the subsequent rise in popularity of some strains of Islamic fundamentalism in those countries. He argues that a combination of factors, including increases in literacy and mass education, actually undermined efforts to secularize societies where unorthodox religious literature suddenly had a readership. Mark Juergensmeyer's piece argues that "acts of religious terrorism are largely devices for symbolic empowerment in wars that cannot be won. . . . Such acts [End Page 493] break the state's monopoly on morally sanctioned killing . . . [and] in doing so, they [demonstrate] to everyone how fragile public order actually is." Among a few weaker contributions, there are outstanding essays in this volume by Robert Keohane, David Held, Mary Kaldor, Seyla Benhabib, Ronald Dworkin, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Marita Sturken.

The second (and shorter) volume, Critical Views of September 11, takes a more international perspective on the attacks, and indeed several of the contributions offer unique perspectives. Kamran Asdar Ali, for instance, provides a political and institutional history of modern Pakistan that outlines that country's precarious position in balancing external expectations with internal political dynamics. Tariq Modood's fascinating contribution, "Muslims and the Politics of Multiculturalism in Britain," argues that many Western countries have failed to understand and respond sympathetically to the civil rights concerns of their own Muslim populations (witness the recent headscarf controversy in France) and in doing so have alienated the very populations from which they now seek support. All these essays were written prior to the war in Iraq. Thus several exhibit a now overly optimistic view that the cycle of violence that arose in the wake of September 11 could be contained. Still, the hope implicit in such projects—the hope that informed and critical readers might become skeptical of facile explanations and uncritical consensus—is not, even now, to be demeaned.

Lawrence Jones

Lawrence Jones is a senior analyst at Lexecon, Inc., in Chicago and associate editor for research of Common Knowledge.

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