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Book Review
| Critical Views of September 11: Analyses from around the World. Ed. by Eric Hershberg and Kevin W. Moore. (New York: New Press, 2002. x, 290 pp. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 1-56584-771-7.)Understanding September 11. Ed. by Craig Calhoun, Paul Price, and Ashley Timmer. (New York: New Press, 2002. x, 454 pp. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 1-56584-774-1.)
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In the immediate aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) commissioned essays from an interdisciplinary group of distinguished scholars and made them available on their Web site. Along with many others, no doubt, I assigned those essays in class, appreciating that they went far beyond the usual journalistic analyses. Now out in book form and packaged into two volumes, the essays have been augmented and revised. Written well before the Iraqi war of 2003, the collection might be expected to seem already dated. It is a testament to the project's high quality, however, that the essays, on the whole, remain timely and intellectually engaging. The SSRC has certainly worked toward its goal of
revising conventional wisdom by bringing forward new evidence, filling in the context that makes facts meaningful, asking questions about received categories of understanding, and clarifying the theoretical assumptions and arguments that support different conclusions. (Craig Calhoun et al., Understanding September 11, p. 15)
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The two volumes have different titles and editors. Understanding September 11, the larger of the two, includes contributions mostly from U.S.-based scholars. Critical Views of September 11 offers essays from "around the world," although many of its authors also hold positions at U.S. universities. The distinction between the two volumes is hardly clear, and, like the subheadings that organize each volume internally, the categorical groupings seem relatively unimportant to the project. Most of the essays range across categories of location, approach, and disciplinary identification; they speak to each other in myriad ways that defy any editor's attempt to organize. The inability to contain or neatly to package the understandings of September 11 is, in fact, a primary message that these volumes seek to convey. There are only two historians (Bruce Cumings and Barbara Metcalf) among the contributors, as the disciplines of political science and sociology clearly dominate the roster. Still, the SSRC has successfully presented a diversity of analytical frameworks and contextual focuses. |
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Although all of the essays are provocative and well written and could spark their own conversations, it would be reductionist in this review to summarize and evaluate individual contributions (thirty-seven in all). There are, however, several overall themes that thread through (though certainly do not define) the collection. |
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One theme explores the politics and ideologies within Islam. All of the writers reject simplistic ideas about a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. Several essays explore the complex histories and philosophies of various Islamic regions and groups. For most, the bin Laden phenomenon does not represent some premodern longing in Islam, as is sometimes popularly presented. Rather, Al-Qaeda's loose network arose from politics internal to long-standing Islamic disputes (over ideas of secularism, for example), was encouraged by the West as a bulwark against Communism during the Cold War, and came to be facilitated by the globalized networks of the postmodern age. Collectively, these essays provide complex, critical, and historically rooted views of Islamic societies. |
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