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Meaning of 9/11 for two Pakistanicommunities: from external intrudersto the internalisation of a negative self-imageCécile Rousseau a & Uzma Jamil aa Child Transcultural Psychiatry Team, Montreal Children'sHospital , Montreal (Quebec), CanadaPublished online: 15 Oct 2008.

To cite this article: Cécile Rousseau & Uzma Jamil (2008) Meaning of 9/11 for two Pakistanicommunities: from external intruders to the internalisation of a negative self-image, Anthropology& Medicine, 15:3, 163-174, DOI: 10.1080/13648470802355467

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Anthropology & MedicineVol. 15, No. 3, December 2008, 163–174

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Meaning of 9/11 for two Pakistani communities: from external intruders

to the internalisation of a negative self-image

Cecile Rousseau* and Uzma Jamil

Child Transcultural Psychiatry Team, Montreal Children’s Hospital,Montreal (Quebec), Canada

(Received 4 November 2006; final version received August 2007)

Since September 11, the increase in international tensions and the subsequentwars in Afghanistan and Iraq have created turmoil and fears in immigrantcommunities, fanned by the media in the context of the war against terrorism.This paper aims to compare the meaning systems evoked around 9/11 within twoPakistani groups – an immigrant community in Montreal and a group in Karachi.It also intends to examine the representation of themselves and of the ‘Other’within these two groups. Results suggest that both Karachi and MontrealPakistani respondents favour a conspiracy scenario which protects the Muslimcommunity from the responsibility of 9/11 events. They refer to an argumentationprocess based on ‘proofs’, thus mirroring the political rhetoric used by the USgovernment and its allies to justify the military intervention in Iraq. In theMontreal group, the pervasive feeling of fear and the bleak image that thecommunity has of itself support the hypothesis of an immigrant internalisation ofthe negative representations of Muslim and South Asian identities in the NorthAmerican context. The negative self-image observed in these minority groupsindicates that more effort than ever should be dedicated to understanding theimpact of the present international context on minority-majority relations inmulti-ethnic societies.

Keywords: 9/11; terrorism; Pakistan; immigrant; identity

It is as if America is sitting right here in the living room with us . . .We have to ask thempermission to breathe. (Parveen, Karachi)

Introduction

September 11 has been a turning point in international relations, reshaping in particularthe relationship between the Muslim world and America. In North America, Muslimimmigrant communities, particularly those of Arab or South Asian origin, have comeunder increased scrutiny, stereotyping and discrimination by the mainstream society.Arabs and Muslims are often depicted through stereotypes which associate Islam, barbaryand violence, and identify them as enemies (Bankoff 2003; Clarke and Hoggett 2004; Hall2003; Merskin 2004; Shaheen 2003). In the US, the Arab-American Anti DiscriminationCommittee reported more than 700 violent events in the nine months following September11 (Ibish et al. 2003). In Canada, during the same period, a survey reported that 56% of

*Corresponding author. Email: cecile.rousseau@muhc.mcgill.ca

ISSN 1364–8470 print/ISSN 1469–2910 online

� 2008 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/13648470802355467

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Muslim respondents had experienced some form of anti-Muslim incidents (CAIR-CAN2002). This increase in negative attitudes and representations of both Arabs and Muslimshas been documented in different Western countries (Salas and Jadhav 2004; Saroglou andGaland 2004) and has led to a revision of accommodation policies vis-a-vis cultural orreligious differences (Fetzer and Soper 2003).

In the West, questions of meaning of the international events following 9/11 have beenclosely linked to the discourse on terrorism and security. Even if its definition remains asubject of controversy, most studies adopt the Pentagon definition of terrorism, ‘calculateduse of violence or threat of violence to inculcate fear intended to coerce or to intimidategovernments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious orideological’(US Department of Defense 2001). However, beyond horror and condem-nation, different authors insist on the necessity to think jointly about the emergence ofterrorism and the security discourse, situating them within the construct of globaltransformations in the last decades (Baudrillard 2002; Derrida 2003; Habermas 2003;Hornqvist 2004). In the Middle East, a study of Lebanese university students observed thatthe vast majority of them favoured socio-political explanations for 9/11, rather than the‘clash of civilization’ hypothesis (Sidanius et al. 2004). It is to be noted that the methodused by the researcher implied that the attribution of the 9/11 events to Al-Qaeda wasshared and beyond discussion.

While there is already considerable research documenting the negative representationsof Muslims in the West, little is known about the meaning and significance ofSeptember 11 and consequent international events within the immigrant communitiestargeted by this context. The great majority of studies on Muslim or Arab minorityperceptions have focused on emotional reactions and perceived consequences of the eventsfor these groups, generally avoiding issues of meaning. Given the heightened politicalsensitivity around security and terrorism concerns, it is not surprising that any discussionof 9/11 and the meaning systems around it is immediately a cause for wariness for thecommunities who feel directly or indirectly targeted by international events. If we are todeal with the mental health consequences of this event within the affected communities, weneed to give attention to the multiple, and sometimes contradictory, ways in which thepresent international situation is perceived and understood.

This qualitative pilot study, carried out in the summer of 2005, had two mainexploratory goals. The first was to document the meaning systems evoked around 9/11within two Pakistani groups, one an immigrant community in Canada, and the other agroup in Karachi. The second was to examine the effect of this international event on theconstruction of Self and Other as perceived by these two groups. The results are used togenerate hypotheses around minority-majority relation shift in multi-ethnic societies whenminority groups are targeted negatively by the media (Merskin 2004).

Methodology

We carried out the study over the course of three months in 2005, with fieldwork intwo sites: Montreal, Canada and Karachi, Pakistan. We used a street ethnographyapproach in Montreal, and snowball sampling in Karachi to find respondents. Wefocused on this particular immigrant community, and these two sites for research forthe following reasons. First, Pakistani immigrants are a distinct community within thelarger South Asian community in Montreal, situated as they are in Parc Extension.Second, they are Muslims and Pakistan is a country that has played a visible role in

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Bush’s war against terrorism. Hence, Pakistanis are uniquely positioned in the global

and local contexts.Parc Extension is an ethnically diverse neighbourhood in Montreal, inhabited

primarily by South Asians and Greeks. Pakistanis make up about 5000–6000 of the

total South Asian community in the area. It is a close-knit community of new immigrantsand refugees. Education and income levels are both relatively low. Many people work in

low-paying factory jobs, in local ethnic grocery stores or receive social assistance from the

government. We chose it as a field site because it has a concentrated population ofPakistanis who face similar challenges in settling in Montreal. Also, this is an area where

concerns were voiced by mainstream institutions after September 11 about emergingintercommunity tensions between the South Asian Muslim families and the health and

education institutions because of a strong increase in religious identity affirmation, forexample, through clothing or school abstention on Fridays (Rousseau and Machouf 2005).

The sample set in Montreal consisted of 10 semi-structured interviews with two

women, six men and two youth respondents. The adults ranged in age from late 30s to

early 50s, approximately. They were all married. The youth respondents were 20–22 yearsold, but were high school students and therefore classified in the sampling as youth. The

respondents were primarily from a low socio-economic class, on welfare and had refugee/new immigrant status. The respondents spoke mostly Urdu or Punjabi. The interviews

were all carried out face-to-face and in Urdu, with the exception of one in English. Theywere all later translated and transcribed independently. The Montreal sample set is skewed

in terms of gender, because we recruited respondents from among the customers

frequenting the Pakistani grocery stores in Parc Extension, and these were mostly men.In addition, we used connections from one of the Pakistani community organisations to

find respondents. We encountered significant resistance from community members interms of participation in the study, due to the sensitive nature of the topic. Most people did

not want to participate, and if they did, they did not allow the interview to be taped.The other field site, Karachi, is a large urban centre located in the southern province of

Sind, Pakistan. Its population is between 10 and 15 million. We chose Karachi as a field

site as a contrast to Montreal, to take advantage of a convenient opportunity to examine

similarities and contrasts in meaning systems among the two groups, one in the country oforigin and the other an immigrant community. The Karachi sample set also consisted of 10

semi-structured interviews, with four men, five women, and one youth, all belonging toeither working middle class or upper middle class. The interviews all took place in Urdu,

with the exception of four which took place in a combination of English and Urdu. The

Urdu interviews were all translated and transcribed later in Montreal. The respondents inthe Karachi sample set differed considerably from the Pakistanis interviewed in Montreal.

They were generally more educated (university-level), belonged to the working middleclass or upper middle class, and were geographically dispersed all over the city. Thus, the

respondents in the Karachi group were not interrelated by a revendicated or attributed

belonging to a community. They spoke Urdu and English.The difference in the profile of respondents influenced their narrative which should be

understood as situated in a very particular space and time and addressed to a specific

person. The fact that the interviewer was from the same community, though not the sameneighbourhood, may have affected how respondents framed their responses to fit their

perceived expectations of the interviewer, given her Pakistani identity and cultural biases(Jamil 2007, 209–18). This study is the first part of a longer research programme, which

focuses on the moral experiences of youth in multiethnic societies, and which has been

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approved by the research and ethics committee of the Montreal Children’s Hospital. Great

care has been taken to ensure total anonymity and confidentiality for the respondents.

Analysis

The analysis of the findings is divided into four sections. The first details the meaning

system evoked around 9/11 within each group four years after the actual events. The

emotional reactions to 9/11 reported in each community are described in the second and

third parts, respectively. They include a temporal dimension because the subjects move

from their reconstructed memories around the moment of the event to their eventual shift

of perspective with time. The recollection of the past has to, of course, be read as deeply

influenced by their present appraisal of the situation and by the interview context. The last

one discusses emerging views and representation of the Self, one’s own community, versus

that of the Other, the mainstream/host community.

Meaning systems: ‘They did it themselves’ and other conspiracy theories

North American mainstream discourse around 9/11 holds Osama Bin Laden and the

network of Al-Qaeda responsible for the attacks. It provided the rationale for the US

invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and in general, while US policies may be criticised,

Osama Bin Laden’s or Al-Qaeda’s role is not questioned. Among the respondents in this

study, we saw an immediate and opposite reaction: Bin Laden and/or Al-Qaeda were not

even named as possible perpetrators responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Instead, the common

response was that ‘they did it themselves’. ‘They’ referred implicitly or explicitly to the

Americans generally, but included a wide range of actors, ranging from the American

government, the CIA, the Jews, other groups in the pay of the Americans, any and/or all of

the above. What is notable is the complete certainty with which respondents expressed this

belief, and the fact that all respondents in both countries were in agreement. There was no

doubt or questioning among the respondents about their views, and only indirect mention

of the mainstream discourse, and no systematic critique of it. Many expressed the view that

their perspective was obvious to everyone, and self-evident within an undefined ‘us’ group.

One reason for the belief in American responsibility was the perception that the US had

had advance knowledge of the attacks. Respondents arrived at this conclusion by a process

of indirect argumentation and frequently used the word ‘proof’ to support the evidence

they were trying to demonstrate. For example, Ameena1 (approx. age 40), described her

reasoning for this belief and its general acceptance in her neighbourhood in Karachi:

. . .Over there, they have such a high security system . . .They have a very fast media which getsto know things beforehand and it was such a big place, where this happened, a place wheretheir good, highly educated people were working (. . .) This is generally what most peoplethought. That this was their own secret conspiracy, that they did it themselves. To the extent,that people even said that they had their high ranked people like military generals, theireducated people, removed from the building beforehand. How could the building be emptyotherwise? By empty I mean that it was such a huge building and so very few number of peoplewere reported dead. It means that they had already evacuated some people, their importantgenerals, before this incident took place.

Though her comments perhaps confuse the WTC and the Pentagon into a single target

site, nevertheless, they illustrate her belief in American responsibility for the attacks.

More importantly, they point to a form of indirect proof offered to support her views – the

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fact that the US must have had enough advance knowledge to evacuate their high rankedpeople, whether military or civilian, from the building(s) before the attacks. The media andtheir advanced security systems would aid in this advance knowledge. Implicit in hercomment is the assumption that the US is a strong and powerful country and therefore it isimpossible to believe that it would be so weak that it failed to prevent an attack by foreignenemies. This indirect form of argumentation, which allows insinuations but avoids riskystatements, was quite frequent among the respondents. Two respondents in Montreal alsocited technology and security as the reasons why the US must have known and carried outthe attacks. One man, Ahmed (approx. 35 years old), who works in a convenience store inParc Extension, said ‘They [Americans] can tell on satellite if a car crosses a red light, sofour hijackers came, how could they not know?’ Another respondent, Khan, a respondentin his early 40s who immigrated to the city 14 years ago, drew inferences based on his ownexperience of living in Montreal in order to indicate his ‘proof’ that the Americans wereresponsible for the attacks:

Here, if you go anywhere, in the metro, for example, there are mostly cameras everywhere.Somewhere they will have secret cameras. If there are so many people in the airport, thereshould have been a movie [surveillance camera footage] of one of them . . .There is nothing(. . .) Here, even in the parking lot, they have four cameras (. . .) Just they blamed it on thisperson, this person, this person.

The group of respondents in Karachi unanimously evoked explanations which werevery similar to those formulated by the Pakistanis in Montreal about Americaninvolvement in the attacks. The two groups understood the motivation or actors behindthe September 11 attacks leads to the question of why they believe the US would do it. Onthis issue, though they were not expressly asked this question, both groups’ views againcoincided on the point that it was done to put blame on the Muslims. For example, inMontreal, Sohail, in his late 30s, said that it was done as a way to get rid of Muslims inAmerica, because their population was growing and posed an internal threat. He stated,‘. . . this incident happened and it goes against the interest of the Muslims and all theMuslim people in America will be driven out. This has happened in reality. This is obvious.It happened, it is happening now’.

The argumentation based on ‘proofs’ replicates the rhetoric which justified thecoalition intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. During the war launchedagainst Iraq, US politicians borrowed from the scientific-legal discourse on evidence, theargument of proof to give credibility to their claims that Iraq did possess mass destructionweapons. It seems that the respondents adopted the same strategy, probably to give addedweight to their interpretations around 9/11.

Reactions to 9/11: silence versus speech

The initial reaction to hearing news of the September 11 attacks, as expressed byrespondents from both groups, was a sense of shock, surprise and disbelief, followed bysympathy for the victims. Overall though, people in the Montreal group wereuncomfortable and unwilling to speak openly about their feelings and reactions to 9/11and its consequences. The Karachi group was much more expressive in contrast, althoughseveral people said that initially there was silence around the issue, among their friends andneighbours. After a month or so, according to respondents, people in Karachi startedtalking, and there was greater discussion about why 9/11 happened and who might bebehind it.

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The respondents in Karachi expressed intense pain and anger at the injustice of theaftereffects on Pakistanis and Muslims, more generally. Samina recounted several storiesof acquaintances who were questioned and fingerprinted by the American embassy inIslamabad or American immigration officials in the US, and at the end, were told that itwas a case of mistaken identity. She linked her feelings about these incidents to Americanpolicy in Iraq as equally unjust and oppressive, thus connecting the personal to thepolitical in her reaction:

So if their institution is so weak, that they do not have full information about any person andthey arrest someone then it is the same thing, as if they had complete information about Iraqand they attacked it and destroyed it so much. On one hand, you act as agent of human rightsand you are a super power. But what have you done to the people there and even still nowwhat is happening to these people there . . . their suffering . . . So after seeing all these things, wedo not have a good feeling about America.

These personal feelings of pain, injury and injustice prompted by the war in Iraq or USactions after 9/11 were expressed by most respondents in the Karachi group, and indicatethe extent of their emotional reaction to September 11 and its aftereffects. Parveen (early40s) described the unfair treatment of Pakistan, despite President Musharraf’s support forBush’s war on terrorism, and used the term ‘lava’ (in Urdu) to denote the intense emotionsbubbling inside both the individual and the collective as a reaction to this injustice:

The lava inside us, that will come out. Our rights, they say our rights should be suppressedthen. When those [reactions to this suppression] come out, then what else will happen? Whatwill happen is that we will say America is bad.

Parveen described the boycotts of Western products, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Wall’s icecream, that took place in protest after 9/11 in Karachi in 2002. ‘Anything that was madeby America, they used to say shut it down, throw it out. People felt so strongly about it.’Thus, her own personal feelings found an echo in the rejection of all things perceived asAmerican products by the larger society. When asked why these boycotts happened, shedescribed the relationship between individual and collective emotional reactions:

Because America used to say that whatever is happening, this terrorism, in our country, theMuslims and Pakistanis are doing this. Because of this, the anti-reaction was that – how couldwe express ourselves sitting here in Pakistan? The only thing we could say was that wedestroyed its [American] products. That is how we could express ourselves. It is an expressionof anger inside a person’s mind, that is what it is.

There was no parallel expression of anger feelings within the Montreal group ofPakistanis. From the very beginning, we perceived a very high level of suspicion anddistrust within the Pakistani community around participation in the study. Thisinsecurity and fear was expressed through silence and a lack of engagement with thetopic. Among the respondents interviewed, many were unwilling to speak openly abouttheir emotional reactions or thoughts about the 9/11 attacks in general. For example, onefemale respondent, Seema (in her late 50s), said, ‘It is not for us to know. Whatever wasgoing on inside the plane, on their radar, we don’t know. But it was common knowledgethat they had it done themselves. (. . .) But this is about politics, and we stay away frompolitics’. She simultaneously stated a distinct opinion, but also distanced herself fromwhat she considered to be a potentially controversial subject. In short, in contrast to theemotional outpouring and in particular the expression of anger by the respondents inKarachi as a result of 9/11, the Montreal Pakistanis were notably silent and guarded, asif not only discussion, but all emotional expression around this topic was a potentialthreat.

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Self versus Other

For both groups, the Self refers to Pakistanis locally and to Muslims globally, while theOther refers to America specifically and to the West, more generally. Along this axis, thecomments of respondents in both groups illustrated a dichotomy of a weak Self and apowerful Other. Respondents in both sites shared a common view of themselves asMuslims who are the victims of 9/11 – instead of the perpetrators which mainstreamdiscourse believes them to be. This victim position was associated with a weak communityself-image. Conversely, the strong Other, the US, is portrayed as a superpower that hassophisticated technology, security, media and other assets that demonstrate its reachthroughout the world.

In Pakistan, this image of the victim was also linked to the suffering resulting fromtheir government’s support for the war on terror. The Karachi respondents underlined theweakness of Pakistanis living in North America, who were forced to return to Pakistanand start over again after facing the loss of their lives’ work in the US after 9/11. However,the converse view of a strong Self and a weak Other is simultaneously present in Karachi.The Karachi group criticised the US as not having the correct intelligence or informationto prevent the attacks, or to apprehend the perpetrators, despite their claims to beingpowerful and having a strong intelligence apparatus. They made mistakes in arresting thewrong person, bombing the wrong place in Afghanistan and Iraq, and generally causingundue suffering to the people of those two countries. This is seen as a sign of the immenseinjustice stemming from American behaviour in the world. Americans are also seen asafraid, and not able to ‘handle’ the loss of lives stemming from a terrorist attack on its soil.In contrast, Pakistanis described themselves as not fearful. If a bomb goes off, people inKarachi are not fazed, and they still continue with their daily lives, as an 18-year-oldrespondent said. They felt they were ‘smarter’ than the US, in that they are able to see pastthe political manoeuvring of their own government and that of the US and have a broaderview of geopolitics. Most importantly, Pakistani respondents felt they were able to resistintimidation in overt and passive ways. According to them, they resist by naming theirchildren Osama, by working hard in their daily lives to earn money and feed their families,and most importantly, by being openly critical and expressive about their feelings aboutAmerican actions and foreign policy behaviour. This last point is particularly key becauseit distinguishes the Karachi group from the Montreal group.

In Montreal, the Self refers primarily to the local Pakistani community in ParcExtension and at times to Muslims in general. The Other refers to the US or to the hostsociety of Canada/Quebec. In this group of respondents, there is a predominant view of aweak Self, but with a positive or ambivalent view of the Other. On one hand, there werepositive depictions of Canadians as people who don’t intrude in the personal lives ofothers, who are helpful and have good manners and have good hearts. The government’sgranting of asylum to refugees, better educational and economic opportunities, and thelaw and security situation in everyday life are all characteristics that respondentsappreciated about the host society. On the negative side, they commented on the threatposed by Canadian society, in terms of undermining parental and community authorityover young people, especially young women, the imposition of French language as anobstacle for refugees and new immigrants and the rudeness of ‘Frenches’ (as one youthrespondent described the Quebecois) towards Pakistanis and other South Asianimmigrants.

However, in the same neighbourhood, there is a predominantly negative view of theSelf, the Pakistani community. Most people did not like the narrow-mindedness of other

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Pakistanis, their lack of honesty, and in particular their lack of helpfulness towards othermembers of the community, who were newer to Montreal and still struggling to settledown. Ahmad said that he felt he could not count on Pakistanis to be his friends, eventhough he only socialised with Pakistanis, because they could be his friends now, but fourdays later, they would be his enemies. One young woman described her frustration withPakistani families who are not educated and who question her father’s decision to send hisonly daughter to school, instead of getting her married:

In other places, people are open-minded. The people here are not open-minded. It’s that sameAsian mentality. We – they don’t let anyone move forward. For example, I live alone with myfather, so people say why do you live alone? Why haven’t you gotten married? This, that, littlethings like this.

Hence, her view that Pakistanis are not interested in letting others, especially women,progress or move forward, adds to the negative self-image of the Pakistani community.

Although the negative view outweighed the positive, there were also instances of apositive representation of the Pakistani community. Respondents mentioned the comfortand familiarity of being in one’s own community, having the freedom to wear clothes fromtheir country of origin, of speaking the same language, having access to the Pakistani/Indian grocery stores and restaurants and services, as important for their decision to live inParc Extension. For example, Sohail, who settled in Parc Extension 10 years ago said,‘Whenever I come outside, I see people from Pakistani, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka,South Asian people. It’s just that we live here as a community’. Seema described it in more‘human terms’. ‘The community here, neighbours, language, is our own. If a human beingcan ask another how they’re doing, and share with them how he’s doing, this is what lifeis’. Seema doesn’t speak or understand any English, and is not very educated in general.She only socialises with other Pakistanis and prefers to keep to members of her ownreligious community, many of whom live in the same building. Thus, maintaining a socialcomfort zone and environment that is separate from mainstream society is an importantpart of her life.

Discussion

Much to our surprise, the elaboration of meaning by the respondents both in Karachi andin Montreal was not shaped as we expected around a shared historical script. All of therespondents questioned the ‘official story’, denying responsibility of Muslim individualsand implying, when not directly affirming, that the events were organised by those whoclaimed to be victims. The conspiracy scenario that our subjects strongly relate to is notreflected in the different surveys done with diverse Muslim groups in Canada andelsewhere after September 11, in spite of the heterogeneity of methods used (focus group,structured questionnaires, case history) (Hussain 2002; Sidanius et al. 2004). It is, however,well depicted in some novels; for example in Brick Lane (Ali 2003), a Bangladeshi noveldescribing, among other things, the interpretation and reactions around 9/11 in a poorLondon neighbourhood, in ways which shockingly resemble the Parc Extension subjectdiscourses in Montreal. The commonality between the Karachi and Parc Extensiondiscourses is the strong need to refuse the aggressor image which is projected onto theMuslim communities. As Hussain (2002, 10) states, ‘Muslims were made to feel responsibleby association’ in such a massive way that it may have been difficult or impossible todiscuss issues of shared political responsibility (Ricoeur 2000) among differentinternational actors in the context of a dominant, manicheist discourse of ‘us and them’.

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The construction of arguments around ‘proofs’ is another common characteristic of

Karachi and Montreal respondent discourse on the 9/11 events. This mode ofargumentation mirrors the modalities which were used by the coalition to justify the

military intervention in Iraq by ‘proving’ that Iraq possessed mass destruction weapons.Concrete facts, fragmented pieces of information and even reinterpretation of ancient

predictions by respondents are used as evidence of the proposed hypothesis and as a claimfor objectivity beyond ideological positions.

Interestingly, while the meanings evoked in Karachi and Parc Extension are quite

similar, in spite of the sharp socio-demographic differences between the two groups, theemotions reported in the aftermath of 9/11 are different. In Karachi, after a time of

astonishment during which fear dictated silence, anger is the predominant effect. This vividand boiling anger, represented through the metaphor of the ‘lava’ comes both from the

negative representation of Muslim forwarded through Western medias and reinterpretedby local ones, and from the suffering inflicted by numerous foreign intrusions in the

country, in which consequences for the people in terms of social upheaval and violence arelargely negated. In Montreal, although fear is also directly named, it is mostly evident in

the multiple strategies put forward to avoid speaking about the international events. Fiveyears after the events, fear appears to still be the predominant reported emotion. While

Hussain (2002) reports that anger is expressed at the same time as fear in focus groups ofCanadian Muslims after 9/11, her report describes expression of disagreements around the

injustice done to Afghani and Muslim people through war or discrimination rather thanan open expression of anger. This may reflect the fact that in North America (and maybe

globally in the West) it can be necessary to tame or hide feelings of anger for the targetedminority communities, because of the risk that the expression of these feelings may

confirm the perceived aggressor image imposed onto their groups.Beyond cultural and local social dynamics, this very negative collective image may

partially result from the internalisation of very bleak representations of their collective

identities (Muslim, South Asian, Pakistani) by the dominant society, mainly through themedia. One may think that the impossibility of outwardly expressing the anger stemming

from this negative image of Self may reinforce this phenomenon. Thus, on one hand, themirror imaging of beliefs leads, as we see in the meaning attribution patterns, to projecting

all responsibility onto the ‘Other’ (Pettigrew 2003). Simultaneously, on the other hand,there may be an internalisation of a negative self image by minorities (Suarez-Orozco

2000), typical of alienation processes. This is not a benign observation. Self-esteem, bothpersonal and collective, and a feeling of personal control are important protective factors,

not only to counter the effects of discrimination (Moradi and Talal Hasan 2004; Rahimi2000), but also to decrease authoritarianism and promote democratic values (Shaffer and

Hastings 2004).Reactive cohesion and identity affirmation were among the few positive outcomes

respondents identified of the transformation subsequent to 9/11. Religious identity

issues, a finding which has been highlighted by various other studies (Ayish 2003; Hallakand Quina 2004), were more clearly spelled out by the Karachi respondents. Other

studies of migrants sometimes mention an increased emphasis on national identities(Witteborn 2004) which we have not observed in Parc Extension. Resistance strategies

appear to differ according to places: if in Karachi calling newborns ‘Osama’ is acommon thing, in North America respondents would not risk such an overt form of

resistance and would rather favour joking or education of the host country society(Ayish 2003; Hussain 2002).

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Conclusion

The American reaction to 9/11 was an immediate and massive effort at securing bordersand boundaries. The discourse on terrorism aided this effort, by offering justification forpolicing not just physical borders, but also social boundaries between communities. Theoutcome of this ‘geopolitical place-making’ process (Coleman 2004) is a wide, fixed andimmutable gap between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The results of this ethnographic study suggestthat this internal re-mapping project is not limited to the US. They describe the existenceof a mirror discourse within the targeted community that reproduces an equally fixedand firm vision of the world, in conflict, between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Only, in this case, thecategories are inverted. If we are to critique the simplistic, manicheist vision of the US,which is fuelling foreign policy initiatives in Iraq and Afghanistan, then we are equallycompelled to view the mirror discourse within the Montreal Pakistani community andthe Karachi respondents with concern. However, the difference is that while theconsequences of American foreign policy are obvious for all to see, the internalisedeffects on the communities targeted by the media are less evident, and are beingchannelled into other more acceptable, and for the time being perhaps safer, modes ofbehaviour and expression. This is a troubling outcome, if we are to consider the long-term effects of 9/11 on intercommunity minority-majority relations in multiethnicsocieties.

Our results raise the hypothesis that among the associated transformations after 9/11,there is a severing of the social link, not only between identified communities but also, andmaybe as importantly, within the communities themselves, aggravating preexisting lines ofdivision. At a time where existing models of multiethnic societies are in disarray, theseobservations constitute an invitation to rethink the notion of otherness in our societiesfrom a multidisciplinary and minority-majority perspective. Beyond a global respect forthe difference (revindicated by multicultural societies) and an emphasis on a commoncitizenship (as in the Republican model), there is probably a need to create spaces ofdialogue and bilateral exchanges that can promote the awareness of the complex other,represent different voices in a more equitable way and prepare an ambivalent (but thusnuanced) perception of the majorities. If the media and the global communication means(like the internet) are at the forefront in terms of spaces of possible encounter, schools arealso a privileged instance in the forging of a polarised and connected representation of Selfand Other.

Note

1. The names and some details about the environment of all respondents have been changed torespect their privacy and confidentiality.

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