Ten years ago on this now infamous day, I myself was ten years old, a sixth grader at Whitesides Elementary school. I remember walking to the entrance of the school and hearing my friend Andrew tell me that “Terrorists blew up the World Trade Center.” I had no idea what he was talking about. The words “terrorists” and “World Trade Center” were new to me, so I gave a rather nonchalant reply, saying something like “Oh yeah? Wow. That’s crazy.”
In the classroom, however, I finally began to grasp exactly what was going on. It turned out that these terrorists were people who were angry with the United States for some reason, and that this World Trade Center was a large complex of buildings in New York. A small television screen, normally reserved for educational films or children’s shows, became our gateway to hell on earth. Broken hearts and burning cities flashed in front of our eyes, and those of us who hadn’t yet met death and tragedy had our innocence tarnished.
Ten years later, I wonder what lessons we best learned from that day. Most of us who were so small had to learn the details of the attacks secondhand through our parents or other adults. Given that even most of the adults didn’t understand the specific details, it seems that the picture of the tragedy itself was further tarnished by a failure to grasp the intricacies of a conflict that may very well define our generation. Instead of attempting to understand this strange and specific enemy, we instead accepted a broad generalization, one which encompassed the entirety of Islam as enemies of the United States. A faith which produced the light and love of poets like Hafiz and Rumi, and the incredible scholarship of academics like Averroes and Avicenna, overnight became our nemesis, and the face of Islam in the United States came not from its prophet or one of its many renowned children, but from Islam’s greatest thief, Osama Bin Laden.
As these years have passed, I am grateful that I have had the opportunity to learn the truth about Islam and its adherents, and to have learned much more about myself along the way. I have learned that the messages worth holding on to are those which come from love, and those which were made to build upon that love. Branding a faith with more than a billion adherents as an enemy of the world isn’t only wrong in a logical sense, but is also wrong morally, as it demonizes brothers and sisters and perpetuates a violent circle between them.
I believe the United States and its people as well as the world’s Muslims are, for the most part, on the right track in building bridges between our not-so-different cultures. I can’t say for certain which lessons even my own friends and family have chosen, the path of love, forgiveness, and reconciliation, or the path of revenge which fortifies a circle of death, but I do hope that my own story might help others find what is best in them, and what is best in the people around them. But for me at least, the lessons of these past ten years are best summed up by the words of Hafiz Shirazi:
Plant the tree of friendship for it brings boundless joy,
uproot the sapling of enmity, for it breeds countless sorrows.
uproot the sapling of enmity, for it breeds countless sorrows.
