Twenty-five years after 9/11, divisions over Islam, identity and conflict remain powerful, raising an enduring question about how diverse societies can live together without turning cultural difference into fear and hatred.

Twenty-five years after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, our world is experiencing terror, violence, atrocity and hatred. Nearly 3,000 people were killed when al-Qaeda hijackers attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, while the courage of passengers prevented a fourth hijacked plane from reaching its target.

The attacks transformed US foreign policy and national security and helped set in motion wars in Afghanistan and Iraq whose human consequences extended far beyond the original violence. The legacy of 9/11 changed the way many societies imagined the relationship between Islam and the West, between ‘us’ and ’them’, and between cultural difference and political danger. That is why, 25 years later, we should ask two questions: how did 9/11 happen, and what did it teach us about living together?

In the aftermath of the attacks, George W Bush declared that the world had to choose between being ‘with us’ and the terrorists. The statement expressed the determination of a nation that had just suffered an extraordinary attack. But the political atmosphere that followed also encouraged a dangerous simplification: the idea that the world could be divided into opposing camps.

The binary ‘us/them’ mentioned by George W Bush had intellectual precedents. Samuel Huntington’s influential ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis had proposed that future conflicts would increasingly occur along cultural and civilisational fault lines. Francis Fukuyama, in a very different argument, had predicted liberal democracy as the endpoint of ideological struggle. The continuing debate between these visions is significant because it shapes how we interpret conflict: do we see people primarily as members of competing civilisations, or as individuals whose identities and political interests are more complicated?

Twenty-five years after 9/11, Huntington’s ideas........

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