The September 11 attacks appear in Edward Said’s argument not as an isolated rupture but as a turning point rapidly absorbed into a larger story of civilizational antagonism. Said places them amid violence involving Islam and the Arabs, the wars that followed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a political language that obscures historical experience; against that language, he argues for patient inquiry, humanistic criticism, and recognition of the interdependence of societies.

The attacks in a continuing history

Said names September 11 as the most lurid and apocalyptic instance of the suicide-bombing phenomenon, linking it to the suffering and violence that surround the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. The sequence matters: the attacks enter an already charged history rather than inaugurating a self-contained conflict. The ensuing violence, he argues, is presented as part of a supposed clash of civilizations—unending and irreconcilable—yet he explicitly rejects that fatalistic conclusion.

The event also sharpens the book’s central challenge to fixed civilizational identities. Neither the Orient nor the West, Said insists, possesses stable existence outside human effort: each is formed partly through acts of affirmation and through the identification of an opposing Other. In a climate where fear, hatred, disgust, self-pride, and arrogance can be mobilized on a large scale, September 11 becomes a point at which political accounts of Islam and the Arabs, and of Western identity, acquire exceptional urgency and force.

Aftermath and the politics of expertise

Said connects the attacks to the post-9/11 period, when media images of an unfamiliar enemy and the general label terrorist could sustain anger and insecurity. He warns that the circulation of such images can be exploited in a crisis. In his account, a small group of civilian elites at the Pentagon formulated a simplified view of the Arab and Islamic worlds, while media outlets supplied experts who validated the government’s line. Terror, preemptive war, and unilateral regime change dominated debate, backed by what Said calls the most bloated military budget in history.

This critique is not limited to the language of security. Said argues that policy expertise can function without substantial knowledge of the societies it claims to explain: commentators need not know Arabic, Persian, or even French to pronounce on what the Arab world needs. Technical fluency and an air of efficiency, he contends, can displace truthfulness, reflection, and real knowledge. In this process, human suffering in its density and pain disappears from view, while memory and the historical past are dismissed.

Said places the wars’ human and political consequences against claims that military power can remake the world. He notes that General Ariel Sharon, who led the 1982 invasion of Lebanon in an effort to change its government, was later a partner in peace with George W. Bush; he also condemns the lack of sufficient dissent in the United States from the proposition that military force alone could change the world’s map. The contrast makes his concern concrete: the language of peace and transformation can coexist with a record of invasion and civilian death, while debate treats force as an adequate substitute for historical understanding.

Empire, memory, and historical context

Twenty-five years after its publication, Said says, Orientalism again raises the question of whether modern imperialism ever ended, or whether it continued in the Orient from Napoleon’s entry into Egypt. He objects to the rebuke that Arabs and Muslims dwell on empire’s depredations to avoid responsibility in the present. That accusation, he argues, drastically underestimates how imperial intervention has distorted the lives of subject peoples across generations and continues to work through the histories of Palestinians, Congolese, Algerians, and Iraqis.

Said asks why the Holocaust is recognized as having permanently altered contemporary consciousness while imperialism’s effects—and Orientalism’s continuing role—are not granted a comparable historical significance. He traces a sequence from Napoleon through the institutional rise of Oriental studies and the takeover of North Africa to later interventions in Vietnam, Egypt, and Palestine, and to twentieth-century struggles over oil and strategic control in the Gulf, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Afghanistan. Set contrapuntally against that sequence are anticolonial nationalism, brief liberal independence, military coups, insurgency, civil war, religious fanaticism, and brutality against successive groups of natives. Each phase, he argues, produces its own distorted knowledge and reductive images of the other.

That longer history also clarifies why Said treats context as a matter of political consequence. The destruction of Iraqi libraries and museums, alongside dismissive talk of changing the Middle East’s map, exemplifies the presumption that history can be cleared away and societies reshaped to fit an external design. Such gestures, in his analysis, ignore the many peoples, languages, experiences, and cultures gathered within the region’s accumulated histories. The attacks and their aftermath cannot be understood by sweeping those histories aside.

Humanism against the civilizational frame

Said presents humanistic criticism as a way to open fields of struggle rather than confine debate to labels and antagonistic identities. It seeks a longer sequence of thought in place of polemical fury, and uses historical and rational reflection to loosen what he calls Blake’s mind-forg’d manacles. This approach does not deny injustice or suffering; it insists that they be situated in history, culture, and socioeconomic reality. Scholars and intellectuals, especially those who live across the cultural worlds of Islam and the West, have a responsibility to complicate formulas that divert thought from concrete human experience toward ideological fiction and collective passion.

For Said, humanism is not a retreat from power. Texts must be read as products of history, with their continuing worldly effects, and inquiry must attend to the ways power enters even specialized scholarship. This principle directly opposes accounts that treat political events as expressions of timeless cultural essences. It also explains why the attacks cannot stand as proof of an immutable conflict between Islam and the West: Said’s method requires attention to histories and relationships that such a binary suppresses.

His alternative is sustained work among cultures that overlap, borrow from one another, and live together, supported by patient and skeptical inquiry and communities of interpretation. He also points to the worldwide protests before the Iraq war as evidence that alternative communities and news sources can connect environmental, human-rights, and libertarian concerns across borders. Against the demand for instant action and reaction, the aftermath of September 11 thus becomes an argument for slower understanding and for humanism as resistance to injustice—not an endorsement of an inevitable civilizational war.