Released: Wednesday, September 1st, 2021

Hosted by Shahjehan Khan, produced by Asad Butt, associate produced & researched by Lindsy Gamble, and sound design and sound mixing by Mark Annotto

Shahjehan introduces us to his world. September 11th turns it upside down.

—————————-

Chapter 1: INTRO

[Sounds] 

Shahjehan Khan

It’s the summer of 2008, I’m in Pakistan, and I’m crying. I’m in Lahore, the capital of the Pakistani Punjab province because my indie band that started on Myspace was now the subject of a feature-length documentary.

[Music]

We were in the midst of shooting in all sorts of incredible locations, including Sufi shrines, 

[Audio]

gorgeous rooftops overlooking ancient Islamic architecture,

[Audio]

and even our own apartment where we were throwing punk shows and having nightly jam sessions.  

[Music]

Although I’d been going to Pakistan to see family since childhood, this particular trip felt different. I’d left a pretty dismal life back home in Massachusetts as a college dropout, and now I was doing something a little bit daring. I was in my early twenties and the cofounder of a so-called Muslim punk band that was starting to gain a small but significant reputation back in the States. 

We had a lot to say about a lot of stuff.

[Audio]

This one’s called “Sharia Law in the USA.”

And people were paying attention to us.

[Audio]

We are The Kominas. Muslim Bollywood punk. Hard to picture perhaps, but it exists.

The reason I’m crying though is because I’m staring at a portrait of my maternal grandfather (my Nana) and I’m supposed to give an interview about him for the documentary. Me, the band, and the film crew are all standing in the main courtroom of the Lahore High Court, because my Nana was the mayor of Lahore in 1955. The way my mom tells it, he was sort of a legend: 

Tina Khan (Amma)

The epitome of a statesman, lawyer, father, and socialite, the kind of man that would get up every single morning and make sure his suit was crisply ironed, and his shoes freshly shined as he took a few puffs out of his hookah, drank his tea, and had his breakfast before he got his day started. 

Shahjehan Khan

Right before I started weeping, a friend mentioned how similar the both of us looked. The resemblance between us has always been really strong, even though I was sporting glasses, shaggy hair, and an asymmetrical goatee. In the final edit of the documentary, you see me staring at him for a little while, then it abruptly cuts to a shot of me having a breakdown outside. I ran out of the room before any sort of interview could take place because something inside me just broke apart.

While outwardly there was a strong likeness, as I stared into his eyes I felt that I was nothing like him at all, that I had actually failed him, failed my family, disgraced our family name and my own name, Shahjehan, one that literally means—get this—“King of the World.” I was anything but that. I couldn’t stop getting high, I felt like I would never be a successful musician (if that was even what I wanted to be), I just believed I had no hope of making anything of myself. It was just another instance of a lifelong impostor syndrome, a lack of confidence that would always get me in the end. And on top of all of that, I was a really shitty Muslim, if I could even call myself one. 

This trip to Pakistan was supposed to be an escape, a fresh start of sorts. I was happy to flee America because America had changed so much in the years before. Even since the end of high school (and frankly before that, too), I was never able to shake the feeling that I didn’t belong. I had come to Pakistan, the land of my ancestors, in the hopes of finally stitching together all these seemingly disparate pieces of me, but, in the courthouse that day, it kind of seemed like maybe I didn’t belong in Pakistan either. 

[Audio]

As the documentary wrapped up, I found myself on a plane back to JFK in New York City, exhausted and emotionally drained. 

Maybe things would be different when I got home. Maybe I could finally get sober. Maybe I could be a better friend, a better son, a better bandmate...a better Muslim.

[Barack Obama Inaugural Address]

Obama: “Men and women and children of every race and every faith”

Shahjehan Khan

There was a new president in the White House, so maybe it wouldn’t be so bad for me and other Muslims in America.

[Sounds]

As I stood in the immigration and customs line going over answers to questions I feared I’d be asked any minute, the agent at the counter put my passport into a plastic folder and asked me to step to the side. 

[Theme]

Fuck.

Chapter 2: OVERVIEW

Shahjehan Khan

America after 9/11. Living in a post-9/11 America. Phrases like these have become part of our cultural vocabulary. And in a way it makes sense; it was a day that changed everything, for Americans and people all over the world. 

But for those of us that saw ourselves as even remotely Muslim, 9/11 did more than we could have ever imagined. Whether we liked it or not, that was the day we all became part of the “Muslim World,” or the “American Muslim community,” for better or for worse. And we really didn’t get to choose what the hell that even meant.

From Rifelion Media, I’m Shahjehan Khan, and this is King of the World: a historical, cultural, and personal look back at the 20 years since 9/11.

Episode 1: 9/11

Chapter 3: BACKGROUND

[Newscast]

Newscaster: It is beautiful outside, perfect September day with lots of sunshine.

Shahjehan Khan

It was a little before 7 a.m. and I was running late for school. I quickly patted my pockets to make sure I had my most prized possession, my $4 tin of Camel Turkish Gold cigarettes, and hopped into my family’s minivan. 

[Sounds]

Eric Dearborn

Saj, you had a Ford Windstar?

Shahjehan Khan

That's correct. Ford Windstar LX.

[Audio continues]

That’s my high school friend Eric, who lived just a few houses down from me on Liberty Square Road in Boxborough, Massachusetts, and he’s definitely right about the minivan. It was the 1995 Ford Windstar deluxe model that included two rear bucket seats to prevent my sisters and I from fighting with each other on road trips, and a custom champagne and wintergreen trim paint job because my dad wanted to sport a newfangled color combo. 

[Windstar commercial]

Once I grabbed Eric, we drove to school, just one town over in Acton.

[Sounds]

There is a joke about Boxborough being such an insignificant place that it had to attach itself to Acton, the “real town” next door. So the two towns combined to form Acton-Boxborough, which we all called “AB.” AB, one right next to the other, in the middle of Massachusetts. B was basically a microcosm of A: quiet suburbs of Boston where you wouldn’t think anything bad happened, where folks basically grew up together, and where downtown meant a gas station, pizza shop, and maybe the Kmart. In Acton, there was a Bowladrome—a severely toned down version of Chuck E Cheese—and in Boxborough there was Video Signals, a place you could count on finding at least 3 VHS copies of whatever movie you wanted. You might even say that Boxborough was like the insecure little sibling always looking at Acton for cues on how to be cool. 

AB was a completely different world than the one that my parents came from, two different cities on opposite sides of Pakistan that could not have been less alike. Education and opportunity is what brought them to America, like so many others.

Shahjehan Khan

What is your first memory of being in the U.S.?

Malik Khan (Agha)

Why I know exactly the date. I landed at New York airport February 3rd, 1974, and while I was waiting to collect my luggage I found out that my suitcase, which had all my clothes and everything, has been left at London airport. So I only had a handbag and the not-very-warm clothes on me. It was a February night.

Shahjehan Khan 

My dad, Malik, who we call Agha, ended up coming to MIT after getting into a handful of other top-tier schools. My parents were married in 1979, and that was when my mother, Tina, but who I call Amma, emigrated as well, the only one of her siblings that settled outside Pakistan. Coming from the warm weather of Pakistan, Boston winters were quite a shock to her.

Tina Khan (Amma)

It was minus 20 degrees outside and there was ice everywhere. And I was wearing these sandals, which, I couldn’t even walk for a second. And my eyes were watering and the water was coming out of my eyes. I couldn't see anything, and my feet were slipping around. And I just kept thinking, "The sun is out, how come it's so cold, even while the sun is out?" I just couldn't get over that. And it's been 42 years and I can never forget that walk.

Shahjehan Khan

My parents were one of a handful of South Asian families in the area, so most of their social circle became centered around the Pakistani community of Greater Boston, and the city started to feel more like home. I came into the picture in 1983, one year after my dad finished his PhD, and that was the day my dad bought a Canon A-1, 

[Sounds]

a cutting-edge camera at that time. We’re really lucky because our lives are like waaaaay more documented than your average family. Agha has tens of thousands of images of every event, big or small, from those first years all the way up until now. With doubles even, so that he could frame one set and send another home to Pakistan every now and then to show what our life was like here. You can follow a comprehensive time line of our family just by moving along the walls of our home. 

My parents eventually had two more kids—my sisters Meryum and Noorjehan—and decided to move to AB to get that quintessential American house in the suburbs. The house they ended up choosing was a cozy two-story grey thing with a long downward sloping driveway, a big yard, and woods behind it, pretty much a standard modest home for the area. 

Shahjehan: Alright, so we are on Liberty Square Road, approaching from the Littleton side, and oh my god, there’s the house—387 Liberty Square Road. It is this disgusting puke-yellow color now; it used to be a very, very lovely blue. Um, but yeah, there it is.

It was hard at first for my parents to get to know people. Unlike their apartment in the city, in AB but you really had to make an effort because all the houses were so spread out. But they were determined to give their kids the best possible education that they could. And like many other American suburbs, it was the schools in AB that really tied things together. 

[Boxborough commercial]

That’s where they started to meet the overwhelmingly white parents of the other kids in the area. 

Tina Khan (Amma)

When the kids started going to school, at that time my kids were the only Brown kids in Acton-Boxborough, especially in Boxborough. The only one other person which was Indian was Priya, who was Meryum's class, whereas you, Shahjehan, never had any Brown guy in his class in Boxborough. But the thing is that for us, that's what we expected, that we are going to go to a place, it is in America, and probably there'll be just white people over there.

Shahjehan Khan 

Once I started going to school, I felt different from the other kids right away. 

Tina Khan (Amma)

When you were in, I think first grade or kindergarten, kindergarten maybe, one day you came to me and you said, "Amma, can you wash my hands with some soap so that they become white like everybody else’s?" And I just laughed because I always make a joke out of serious things, but I make a joke just to get over with it. So I said, ‘Beta, that soap has not yet been invented, which will clean your hands. So you have to live with these Brown hands.’ But that is one thing which was only you. Meryum and Noona never felt conscious being Brown, but I think you always from being very little, because I think Meryum had Priya as her class fellow so that was another Brown person. So, and you never had anybody in your class who was Brown. So that's why I think you were more sensitive with the Brown color.

Shahjehan Khan

From those early years, my mom wanted to make sure her kids grew up not just as Americans, but as Pakistanis too. My parents’ community of Pakistani immigrant friends were all now beginning to have families, and they all became our extended family since most of our actual relatives were back in Pakistan. This is the case for a lot of immigrant communities in America. 

But you know how in like a lot of cities you have a Chinatown or Little Italy where a lot of those immigrant families lived? The Pakistani immigrant community in Boston didn’t exactly create their own little enclave.

Instead they spread out all across the greater Boston metro area. So my earliest memories are of making long drives to other towns all over Massachusetts every weekend night, to big Pakistani-style potluck dinner parties where the parents would socialize and the children would just be running rampant.

And while I definitely had a few friends at these get-togethers (we’d play outside, play video games, drink too much Coke), I remember even at a young age feeling a huge disconnect between my so-called community friends who were mostly Muslim and Brown and my school friends, who were almost entirely white and non-Muslim. 

Shahjehan Khan

If you could maybe just describe, like, who I was in high school that you can remember, and you can be as brutally honest as you'd like, whatever you want to say.

Meryum Khan

When I think of Bhai in high school, I think of me in ninth grade and you in 11th grade. So I don't want to say unmotivated because I don't think it was that, so something less than that. 

Shahjehan Khan

My sister Meryum is the middle kid of us three siblings.

Meryum Khan

I mean, you had your group of friends, but you weren't necessarily, like, like all

of them, but you were with all of them. Do you know what I mean? And so….

Shahjehan Khan

Can you expand on that a little bit more?

Meryum Khan

Yeah, sure. Like, I mean, your friends were like, just like a group of like regular white guys who lived in this small town where we grew up. So, um, you know, and that wasn't exactly who you were or who we were, like I mean, we, we didn't do a lot of, um, white stuff growing up.

Shahjehan Khan

My sister Meryum, she’s definitely someone that’s been a stabilizing presence in my life, and the fact that she’s a successful, well-adjusted lawyer makes a lot of sense to me. I’ve always seen her as someone who was really adept at navigating the different parts of herself, somebody that was pretty early on able to decide who she was gonna be and stick with it. 

Meryum Khan

You know even when we were kids, we didn't do Christmas…you had your friends but you weren’t always like them. And I felt like I was a little different because I have my school friends, but then I had a separate group of Muslim Desi friends who I hung out with. I felt like you didn't always have that. Um, so maybe that's why I kind of thought of you as like, with your friends, but not really like them so much. 

Shahjehan Khan

The word "Desi" basically means “from the country” in the context of South Asia or the Indian subcontinent and the surrounding countries and is kind of like an adjective that gets attached to lots of different stuff like food, clothes, and in this case, people. We were really fortunate to have spent much of our childhood traveling to Pakistan to see my extended family. Being in touch with our roots was super important to my parents and I’m grateful that they instilled this in us. I spoke Urdu pretty well and even understood a little Punjabi. But as I got older, those social disconnects between being American and Pakistani were really starting to take up a lot of emotional and mental space in my head. 

How do you identify? If someone were to ask you, like, "Who are you?" what would you say?

Malik Khan (Agha)

Then I'd basically tell them, you know, that I am from Pakistan originally, I was born and raised over there. That's my specific identification as part of an ethnic community, but I also belong to a larger community called the Muslims because I'm Muslim by faith.

Tina Khan (Amma)

From day one, when I came to this country—because when I was in Pakistan, I didn't have to identify myself to anybody, so the identification came along when I came over here—and up till now, it's been 42 years since I have been over here, the best identification that I would give about myself and introduce myself to somebody is that my name is Tina, I'm from Pakistan, and I'm Muslim. 

Shahjehan Khan

It’s interesting that neither Amma nor Agha identify as American even though they are both proud American citizens, and have lived here much longer than Pakistan. 

When I’m asked about my identity or where I’m “really from” (and depending on if I really want to have that conversation), I’ll usually say Pakistani American, but I won’t always say Muslim the way both of them did. Even today there’s something about pinpointing that which is hard for me, maybe because I don’t practice all that much in a ritualistic sense. But I also don’t want to abandon it, so sometimes I’ll hide behind a vague, "I grew up Muslim." 

By the time I was 17 and entering senior year, I had pretty much tuned religion out of my life. Being a Muslim really isn’t that big a deal when it comes down to it. It’s just a religion or set of beliefs and practices like any other. Literally 1 in 4 people in the world are Muslim, and it’s the third largest religious group in America, having been here since slaves were first brought over (and some say even before that). And despite what you might hear in the media, there’s not one definitive way to be Muslim, but I didn’t really know that as a kid. The point is, just like anything else, it means different things to different people and manifests itself in distinct ways. My parents just grew up in a place where Islam was more visible...and more a part of one’s daily life. My parents wanted us to believe in the basic tenets of Islam, fast during Ramadan, pray more often than I did, and be active in our mosque. 

To me in my small American town, I just couldn’t fit Islam into my life, not the way my parents wanted. I found going to Sunday School at the mosque to be a chore (aside from the Domino’s Pizza and Dunkin Donuts Munchkins). I just fixated on the two big noes that were relevant to my life at that age: no drinking and no dating. (Just to be clear, even those depend on which Muslim you’re talking to, but we’re talking about me now.)

And there was nothing about being either Pakistani or Muslim that I was particularly proud of in school, definitely not around our hometown. AB was one of those places where things were just easier if you blended in, did your homework, played a sport or did an extracurricular activity, and then went on to college. It was like a super high-pressure place to be in, and not just for me but for my mom, too. 

Tina Khan (Amma)

One thing that I really wanted and it didn't come along was, I tried to put you in all kinds of sports, but you never showed interest in sports. And it was so strange; the thing is that if anybody knows Acton-Boxborough, it is a place where if your kid is not in sports, you just don't belong to that city. And that is what was the pressure which was on me. 

Shahjehan Khan

It’s not that I was bad at sports. In fact I was pretty darn good at—get this—figure skating of all things.

[Audio]

Tina Khan (Amma)

Ice skating is one you did show interest, but that also was a little bit discouraging. And this way you were good at it. But out of the 15 people 14 were girls, and you were the only boy, but you still kept doing it. 

Shahjehan Khan

Yeah I kept doing it until I realized all the other boys were playing hockey—the one game my mom wouldn't let me play because she thought it was too dangerous.

Tina Khan (Amma)

Being in Pakistan sports were never that big a deal in Pakistan when you went to schools or colleges. Acton-Boxborough was one of the reasons which I always felt that, “Oh my God, I wanted him to be an athlete,” but that was not what I wanted you to be. It was just because everybody kept saying that a kid has to be good in sports. 

Shahjehan Khan

I didn’t then, and I still don’t give a shit about sports. Sports is such a huge deal to so many people, especially in Boston, that not being like all about the Red Sox, Celtics, or Patriots definitely leaves you out of many conversations.

It wasn’t just sports though; the other big thing in AB was doing well in school, getting into the best classes, and then going to the best colleges, and neither me nor my mom really got the hang of that stuff either.

Tina Khan (Amma)

Every time I would get together with any of those parents, I would always feel that I think I don't know what I'm doing. And I think they know more than me, because they would talk all the time about school. I don't know whether it was a pressure which I felt because I had not gone through this school system, if I would have been born and raised over here maybe I wouldn't have felt that, but on the whole, Acton-Boxorough, I always felt was full of pressures.

Shahjehan Khan

It is a pressure a lot of immigrant parents probably feel, especially those that send their kids to schools where they’re clearly in the minority.

Tina Khan (Amma)

I was depressed just being around them because the thing is, I didn't know actually how the system works, how the schools work because too, like, “Why do you go and see the counselor so many times? What do you talk with the school counselor about? How do you put your son or girl or whatever in these courses, which take them to good schools?” I didn't know all of this. So I always felt the pressure that there is too much going on in the school system, which I don't understand.  

[Theme]

Shahjehan Khan

Maybe sports and academics wasn’t for me, but a few years before I got to high school, I did find my thing, the thing that I did better than most of the other kids, and that made me feel like I belonged somewhere. 

[Audio]

That thing was the electric guitar. 

Noorjehan Khan

When I think of our childhood, I think of when you and I used to wrestle, which I think is worthwhile because you are seven years older than me, but because I was so chunky, I could take you pretty hard and cause you were so scrawny. 

Shahjehan Khan

That’s my youngest sister, Noorjehan, who is in many ways the polar opposite of me. She is super regimented, has spreadsheets for every day of the week, and is a fiercely independent thinker who gets shit done. Like done done. 

Noorjehan Khan

I remember wrestling and I think you used to say, ‘You wanna wrassle?” Which I don't know what that's from, but I remember that very vividly. 

Shahjehan Khan

Probably Nickleodeon or something. 

. 

Noona, which is what we all call her at home, was only like 5 or 6 when I got my first electric guitar in 1998 as a present for a ceremony called an Ameen, which is when a Muslim finishes reading the Quran for the first time.

[Audio]

It’s really the one big truly religious thing I did growing up. My parents rented a church near our house and threw a big party for the Pakistani community to celebrate.

Noorjehan Khan

I remember there were lots of people there. I had to get dressed up and I don't know. I just, I think as a younger sibling, I was like, “Oh this is a big deal.” I think you found out that you were getting a guitar before, although maybe I'm remembering that wrong. I think my memory is also skewed because I remember the picture of you getting the guitar at the Ameen. So I can't remember if that's me remembering the time or me seeing the picture and pretending that's a memory.

Shahjehan Khan

Noona’s memory here is actually pretty right on. The picture she’s talking about is me with a massive smile from ear to ear, mushroom haircut, big ass glasses, and a radiant, sweaty face from having jumped up and down at the site of a brand-new, red Fender Strat. I remember tearing the box open, getting a waft of the crisp rosewood fingerboard as I peeled away the plastic lining. I plugged the 5-foot cable into the tiny 10-watt practice amp, flipped on the distortion switch, and rocked the fuck out of that little church office room, pausing only to take the photo Noona was just talking about. Standing there in my shalwar kameez (my super fly Pakistani clothes) with my parents, I am far less concerned with having finished an important Muslim rite of passage, and more so relieved that maybe, just maybe, I won’t have to stress so much about not caring about sports now. Maybe I’ll finally be a cool kid.

Interestingly enough, in that photo I also see like a visual representation of the cognitive dissonance between my being Pakistani, Muslim, and American. I remember reading the Quran with my mom as a kid. She would have it way up in a cabinet so that it was above everything else. It was wrapped in this bright-purple velvety cloth that was secured with a piece of red lace, and kept in the same place as a lot of her cooking stuff so it would always have this really beautiful smell that reminded me of Pakistan. But we were reading it together in Arabic, a language that neither of us spoke or really understood. We weren’t reading the English translation, and I definitely wasn’t paying attention in Sunday school when the teachers were going over what some of it actually meant. It took years to complete (it’s like really long, like REALLY long) and I definitely was just going through the motions as I got older, to get it done and get my epic gift. 

I had been not so secretly begging for an electric guitar for several years by that point. My love of music definitely comes from my dad and his vast collection of cassette tapes, everything from classical South Asian stuff all the way to Chuck Berry and Johnny Cash (he basically could have run his own mixtape distribution service), but the last thing he wanted when I started playing guitar was to pursue it seriously and have it get in the way of school. But I fucking loved it and I took to it like other kids in my classes took to their homework. As high school got more and more challenging, I became less and less interested in anything that wasn’t related to music. I had found my purpose in life, or at least that’s what I thought as Eric and I were driving to school the morning of September 11th.

Chapter 4: 9/11

[Sounds]

Shahjehan Khan

Once we parked the Windstar in the school parking lot, Eric and I rolled into the hallway, put our shit into our lockers, and stood around with the rest of our crew until the bell rang. 

[Sounds]

First class of the day was calculus with Mrs. V. By this time, AB had a few other Desi kids, including a few who were in the honors calc class. And even though mine was technically “accelerated/enriched/advanced placement,” I was definitely one of the least accelerated or advanced students in that class. 

See, the other thing that had become a routine, even an identity of sorts, was getting high. 

[Anti-drug commercial]

By this point I had started to smoke weed pretty regularly after having tried it a year earlier, and man did I latch onto it. At first it was the perfect way to silence all those voices in my head that were telling me I wasn’t enough of whatever version of me I was supposed to be, but pretty soon it was clear I was running away from something else. 

My friends had a front-row seat to my changing persona.

Jay Russell

There'd be that trash can right by the lockers. And sometimes you'd be like sitting on the trash can, like just totally blazed. And you would just be there with like your hat on and you'd be like, huhuhuhuh. We’d be like, “Oh, Saj is high.”

Shahjehan Khan

Jay was the quintessentially good-looking Brooks Brother, the track star, and the dreamboat fantasy boyfriend who wore perfectly pressed khakis to school most days, but those weren’t the reasons I was jealous of him. He never drank, never got high (still hasn’t), and never seemed to do anything all that bad because he had this confidence in himself that I didn’t. 

Eric Dearborn

I felt like my most concerned moments in high school was not the fact that you were getting high or screwing around, or even the fact that you were like slacking off in school a little bit, because honestly, senior year, that tends to happen, the senior slide or whatever the hell it's called. 

Shahjehan Khan

Eric was the type of fiercely loyal friend who would let me know how he felt about the choices I was making. Most nights I would go home and wonder why I needed to get so much more fucked up than everyone else, why I couldn’t seem to enjoy it and move on. 

Eric Dearborn

I think the main concern for a lot of us then was when you kind of were becoming a caricature to other people in the school. Cause we didn't care. We loved you. We knew who you were. But I think that's what really bummed me out, Jay talking about that trash can that you used to sit on kinda brought back that memory for me where, “Oh, Saj is on a trashcan, people that don't necessarily care about him are going to go up to him and fuck with him because they know that he's really high right now.”

Shahjehan Khan

I don’t think it’s any accident for Eric to have used the word caricature to describe me at that critical point in my life. We all had our ups and downs that year but there was something else already going on with me, like this deep sense of shame and guilt about who I was and the choices I’d made. 

Kids like Jay and Eric, they were doing things like researching colleges, studying for the SATs, and shit like that. I felt like I wasn’t on the same planet as any of them. I felt the same way about the other kids at Sunday School. I even felt distant from my family. 

I had no idea who I was becoming, and all of these pieces of me—the guitarist, the high school senior, the funny Brown kid, the Desi kid, the Muslim son—weren’t really forming a cohesive whole person. And as I started to turn more and more inward, smoking weed was an emotional safety blanket of sorts that helped me avoid thinking about the future, about how awkward I was around girls, or about how I just didn’t seem to fit in anywhere.

[Newscast]

Newscaster: It is beautiful outside, perfect September day with lots of sunshine. Ohhh, will you look at Washington, huh? I’m going outside today.

Shahjehan Khan

All of these things were swirling around in my head at the same time that morning (as they often did) as Mrs. V fired up the overhead projector and began to write out the day’s lesson with her red felt-tip pen on the erasable plastic sheet. Class was almost over when one of our classmates came running back from the bathroom, looking completely distraught, saying that we needed to turn on the TV right now.

[News Montage]

We understand that there has been a plane crash on the southern tip of Manhattan. You’re looking at the World Trade Center...

This just in, you are looking at obviously a very disturbing live shot there. That is the World Trade Center…

We understand that a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. We don’t know anything more than that...

Oh, there’s another one. Another plane just hit. Oh my god. Another plane has just hit...

Another one just hit the building. Wow.

It appears that something hit the Pentagon on the outside of the fifth corridor.

We have a report now that a large plane crashed this morning in western Pennsylvania…

We are a nation under siege…

There are no words...

[Music]

Shahjehan Khan

While many moments from that day are a bit hazy, I do remember the physical tensing up of my body, kind of like when you narrowly avoid a car accident or you get some really bad news that just turns your stomach upside down. That’s what I remember most about my classmate running back into the room repeating over and over again, “Oh my god, oh my god.” I know she came in right toward the end of the period because the first plane hit the first tower at the World Trade Center in New York City at 8:46 a.m., and my next class (psychology with Mr. Green) was at 9:05. He remembers how we ended up at the library before the bell rang with eyes glued to a TV on a rollout cart.

Mr. Green

And of course we had no way of realizing that this had only just started. And so as we stood there together, we watched as the second plane hit the second tower. 

Shahjehan Khan

Wow.

Mr. Green 

And it was in that moment that I think people realized like, wow, okay, this is, it's unclear what the extent of this is. It's very, that separateness that you often feel from a global event. I think people felt extremely vulnerable and very scared.

Shahjehan Khan  

Mr. Green and the rest of the faculty were in a particularly difficult situation as they, just like the rest of us, were trying to get a grasp of what was going on.

Mr. Green

We were put on the equivalent of lockdown, you know, in the world before there were a lot of school shootings, there was this. I guess the word is lockdown, and figuring out if we were going to have parents come pick students up, if we're going to do buses, what we were going to do. And being charged with the job of helping students feel like it was going to be okay. And trying to reach into myself because I myself didn't know if it was going to be okay, really in that moment, wasn't sure what the extent of this was going to be.

Shahjehan Khan

Teachers were running back and forth between classes and department centers trying to refresh browsers on the handful of computers that were connected to the internet; apparently the CNN website wouldn’t load so they had their radios on as well. 

[Audio]

At 9:37 a.m., another hijacked plane crashed into another building with people in it, this time at the Pentagon. At 9:59 a.m. the South Tower collapsed, and four minutes later another hijacked plane crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Twenty-five minutes after that, the North Tower fell to the ground, as it seemed a horrifying apocalyptic film was playing out before our very eyes. 

At 11:02 a.m., as New York City was getting evacuated, I should have been sitting in a C programming classroom, but instead an attack on the United States was unfolding minute by minute. At 12:16 p.m., when I would have been smoking a cigarette after lunch on any other day, the U.S. was officially closing its airspace, like shutting it all down, like no flights anywhere AT ALL. 

[Music]

At this point it was clear that there was a massive loss of life, but no one knew whether the scale was in the hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands. And you have to remember that we had no way of knowing if or when the attacks would stop. No one anywhere in the country felt safe.

[Audio]

We would eventually learn that there were a couple of people from the AB community that were on American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to hit.

Mr. Green

One of the losses was somebody that I knew. His son had been a camper that I had worked with very closely at Camp Nashoba. And so it was really the first time in my life that I had a loss like that. And I don't want to exaggerate it. It's not that I was close to this kid's dad, but for years, this kid's dad had put him on the bus to camp. There'd been almost a daily wave and a contact with this family. 

Shahjehan Khan

The other community member was a flight attendant who we now know “called a ground supervisor by air phone and relayed information about the hijackers that gave the F.B.I. a head start on the investigation.” Both were parents, with families, who lived in the same town as my family, drove on the same streets that we did every day. We couldn’t shake the sense that although we were a couple hundred miles away from New York City, this quickly became a local tragedy as well as a national one. 

As the school day was drawing to a close at 2:18 p.m., Jay was sitting in Mr. Green’s other class, U.S. history.

Jay Russell

Last period. Eighth period. I had history with Mr. Green and I'll never forget. He said, starting off the class, he just goes, “We need to talk.” And I'll never forget him saying that, because it was basically, “The world is changing because of what happened today. And we have no idea what's going to happen.” I get like goosebumps just thinking about that.

Mr. Green

So as horrendous as it was, I felt like I wanted to remind people that we were in Acton, we were not in New York. We were not in a major city. That the likelihood of this coming home to us in the way we were all really afraid of was not high and that we would be safe. But I'll tell you, man, that was really, that was tough. Until COVID, I would say that that was the most traumatic thing that has ever happened in my career.

[Audio]

Shahjehan Khan

Eventually I made it back home where my aunt and cousins (who just happened to be visiting from Pakistan) were glued to the TV along with my mom. I found out that they all had actually planned to drive down to New York that morning, as my cousin Saadia called it the most shocking experience of her life.

Saadia Asim

I don’t know. I cannot describe the feeling of shock and paranoia at the same time. We had, of course trying to figure out, started calling people we knew in New York, and the guys that I was supposed to go and stay there with. All in all, it was just unbelievable, actually. After that I think that our entire holiday mode had completely changed.

Shahjehan Khan

Saadia’s sister, Mehru:

Mehru Sami

Well at that time, I think I didn't realize. I was pretty young, I think I was 17 years old. So I did not realize what happened till a few hours later, everything shut down. And I was just freaking out thinking that we were about to go there. And probably that was going to be the first thing we would go and see. It was quite traumatic.

Shahjehan Khan 

This was actually their first trip to America. We’d always gone to Pakistan to see them but they’d never been here to see our home and our life in Boxborough. It had been so nice to have them around for a few weeks, especially for my mom, who doesn’t have any other blood relatives in the U.S. To have their trip end like this was just unimaginable. 

Saadia Asim

It was as shocking for us as the next person. We were completely taken and saddened by the incident. My khala (aunt) wanted to go there and to help out whatever way that she possibly can. But I was at least scared to step out of the house.

[Audio]

Shahjehan Khan 

News would continue to come in for the rest of the day from New York, DC, and Pennsylvania. As the first World Trade Center survivor was rescued at 3 p.m., we were all were thanking God that my cousins didn’t leave super early and make it in time as was the original plan. 

We watched the news for the rest of that night, and made phone calls to friends and family to make sure that they were ok and confirm that we were ok, probably like every other American. And then we waited, wondering what this would all mean, if it was all even over. 

At 8:30 p.m. that night, President George W. Bush gave an address to the nation.

[President Bush Address]

Bush: Tonight, I ask for your prayers for all those who grieve, for the children whose worlds have been shattered, for all whose sense of safety and security has been threatened. And I pray they will be comforted by a power greater than any of us.

Shahjehan Khan

I don’t remember feeling reassured by the President. All I remember is desperately wanting to smoke a joint and play guitar in my room like I did every other night. Anything to stop my mind from heading to the places it was already going. I couldn’t quite put it into words but it felt like I was somehow gonna have to answer for what had happened, like there was some other layer to all of this.

[Audio]

Bush: Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you are with me.

Shahjehan Khan

Here’s what the world knew the night of 9/11:

There had been a highly coordinated terrorist attack on America involving four hijacked airplanes.

Bush: This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace.

The scope of the death and destruction was unimaginable and it was anyone’s guess as to how many had died or been injured.

Bush: America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. 

There would be an immediate military response from the United States, the likes of which had perhaps never been seen before. 

Bush: None of us will ever forget this day, yet we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world.

And Muslims were already the primary suspects.

Bush: Thank you. Good night. And God bless America.

[Theme]

Chapter 5: REACTIONS

Shahjehan Khan

What does it mean to be united? I feel like it demands something of people, a “sameness,” which is tricky if you already feel like you don’t belong. I don’t think I felt any real unity with any part of me on 9/11, even before the attack. I wasn’t sure about my own values, and I can’t say I ever had any real enemies, just groups and cliques that I felt either indifferent to or slightly envious of. But I had no idea just how these questions of identity, belonging, and loyalty were about to be turned completely upside down.

The morning of September 12th there was an eerie sort of buzz around the school hallway. Kids were still standing in their normal pods, but there was an energy everywhere as students waited for some kind of announcement or assembly, knowing this wasn’t going to be just another school day. As I approached my locker, a horrible feeling in my stomach, three guys were standing in my way, as if they’d been waiting for me. These three were always hanging out together, and I especially didn’t like them because one was now dating a girl that had broken up with me, so I was already sort of on guard. 

He asked me a question which was and is probably still the single most defining moment of my young adult life. “What did your people do?” I brushed it off. I pretended like I didn’t care. And just walked away. Yet I was more afraid and confused than I had ever been in school, more than ever before in my life actually. And then my mind goes blank from there. 

That’s all I remembered up until this year, when my parents told me what happened when I got home.

Tina Khan (Amma)

I said, “Did something happen in the school?” And you said, “No, nothing happened in the school” and you went to your room. And then you just said to me, I think about an hour or something after that, “Amma, can you come to my room?” So I went to your room and you started crying. And you said that, “Amma, three or four boys from my own class, when I was going in the corridor, they came to me and they said to me with their finger like this, ‘What did you do in New York?’ like this.” And you said, “I didn't understand, why did they do that to me? But they pointed the finger at me.”

Shahjehan Khan

Amma told Agha what had happened. Like me they were also confused and scared, conflicted about whether or not (or even how) to say anything to the school. Amma says she really wanted to but Agha didn’t want to make a scene, so they instead brought it to an interfaith group they attended every month. The group was having an emergency meeting in the wake of the attack, and when the other members heard about it, they convinced my parents to tell the school.

According to my folks, a couple days later, the same three kids threatened me at a party we all happened to be at. 

Malik Khan (Agha)

During that birthday party these four or five kids, they were also there, and they probably, they cornered you in the basement or something and, or threatening or trying to physically beat you up or something.

Shahjehan Khan

Other friends at the party brought me home and let my parents know what happened, and my folks tried to go back to the school with this new information. But according to my mom, they didn’t do much.

Tina Khan (Amma)

So then we did go to the principal. [inaudible] I remember his face, but I don't remember his name. And we went and we told him all of that.

Shahjehan Khan

What did he do? [whispered]

Tina Khan (Amma)

He didn't do anything. 

Shahjehan Khan

What did he say? [whispered]

Tina Khan (Amma)

He said, “We'll see if we can talk to the students” or all that. But he never like did give them any punishment or anything. And never told us what he did.

Shahjehan Khan

I want to just stress something here—I have literally no recollection of the party, only the original incident, which I can remember like it was yesterday. The kid who interrogated me about “my people” was in the middle, but there was this other kid there, his menacing sidekick whose name I had forgotten.

Noorjehan Khan

Someone did harass you in high school, right?

Shahjehan Khan

Yes.

Noorjehan Khan

Yes. And I believe that same person's younger brother was in my graduating class. And I remember knowing that and being like, “Oh, I hate you.” And he was one of the, like, star football players….

Shahjehan Khan

So I had a call last week with Jay and Eric. We had forgotten—we flipped through the yearbook together on the podcast and we tried to figure out who that was and, wow! I didn't know this piece.

Noorjehan Khan

Yeah.

Shahjehan Khan

He literally wore a green army jacket everyday with a German flag on the side of it, and I’m thinking he’s probably the one that was gonna kick my ass at the party.

Noorjehan Khan

Either him or his brother had some sort of tattoo that was like white power-related or something. I remember being like, “This is like out of a high school movie of like classic popular white dude/head of the football team is also like a Nazi.” And being like, “classic Acton.” That sucks—nothing really came out of that. And this kid is still here and his parents and he's probably the same. And I never had a single interaction with that kid, he probably doesn’t even know that I went to high school with him, but I remember every time I saw him being like, “I hate everything about you.”

Shahjehan Khan

It didn’t get any easier for me.

At some other point that first week following 9/11, back in calculus class, while we were all sharing thoughts or having like whatever sort of pre-class moment the faculty had decided we should have, another kid launched into his own expert analysis of how this had all the hallmarks of Islamic terrorism, even mentioning Osama Bin Laden by name. 

[Audio]

I’m pretty sure he threw the word Pakistan in there somewhere, just to really drive the point home. 

It seemed like overnight, nicknames like “Dune Coon” and the “Packistani with the terrorist death ray” were becoming part of my everyday life. And although that last one basically sounds like a superhero (I mean who doesn’t want a death ray?), it was all super overwhelming. And sometimes, even the teachers would laugh.

It seemed like the only solution for me was just to keep my head down, play my guitar, and keep smoking my weed. I just had to get through the rest of senior year, get into literally any college that would take me, and then I could move away and start all over again. 

[Music]

Chapter 6: CONCLUSION

Shahjehan Khan

9/11 was a cataclysmic act of unimaginable violence for Americans. Almost 3,000 human beings died in the span of a few hours, at least 6,000 were injured on the day itself, and thousands more suffered from long-term physical, psychological, and emotional traumas, many of which will never heal. For those of us that came of age during that time, it’s hard to overemphasize that it wasn’t just another tragic historical event, but literally THE EVENT that changed our lives forever. It was almost like hitting a reset button, reminding us all how globalized and vulnerable we are, how none of us exist in a vacuum, that our place in the world as individuals is also defined by things that happen to people we may know nothing about. 

That day also changed how Americans looked at each other, and for many, created a sense of national identity and patriotism that was stronger than ever before. Immediately following the attack, approval ratings for the president shot up to 90%, as legislation like the PATRIOT Act, the detentions at Guantanamo Bay, the idea of a “Global War on Terror,” and an entirely new Department of Homeland Security began to flood our media and guide the national conversation about how “we” were going to respond to “them”—the people that did this to “us,” the people that those three assholes were grilling me about. 

[Audio] 

9/11 also, unfortunately, forever solidified the association between Islam and terrorism in the global conversation about political violence. Anyone that had even the most remote association with or passing resemblance to Muslimness of any kind was now a target. We were now public enemy number 1. As President Bush himself said, you were either with us or against us. And the facts didn’t matter; no one cared about the nuances. Muslims everywhere had been put into the “against us” category.

Meryum Khan

I had talked to Agha about it at one point. We were going for Sunday school and he was just, in his very serious way, just saying, “Do you understand that there was this huge tragedy? Blah blah blah.” I said, “Yes, I know.”

Shahjehan Khan

My sister Meryum again.

Meryum Khan

I’m sure you’ve had those discussions with him where he mostly talks and you sorta nod along? But I felt like he wanted to just say those things out loud to me, that “as your dad, I'm reminding you we're Muslim and this is not what Muslims believe. And this was a tragedy.” And I was like, “Okay, thank you.”

Shahjehan Khan

Agha doesn’t remember this specific conversation, but it sounds like he wasn’t just trying to assure Meryum, he was speaking to everyone at the same time: to those guys who confronted me the next morning, to the school, to the towns of Acton and Boxborough, to the citizens of Massachusetts, and maybe to America as a whole. 

[Music]

The real question was, would anybody listen?

[Audio]

20 years later, we’re still fighting these same battles, trying to complicate awfully simple narratives that put Muslims at the center of the conversation around 9/11. It’s not a stretch to say 9/11 really fucked with the collective identity of the American Muslim community. 

For years I struggled with my place in the world as a Pakistani American Muslim, and that’s part of the reason I broke down crying just looking at that picture of my Nana in Pakistan nearly a decade later.

Americans’ acceptance of Muslims has continued to deteriorate since the attacks and although Muslim Americans have responded with resilience through the countless instances of othering, discrimination, and hate crimes, there’s been a good amount of depression and anxiety, too. But we have persevered.

The same can be said for me and my journey over the last two decades, which I’m honored to share with you over the coming weeks. The King of the World podcast will weave together a snapshot of what it was like for me—and other American Muslims—to come of age in a post-9/11 world. 

Like millions of other American Muslims, I had no idea just how much that one day would impact my life, whether I liked it or not.

[Theme]

Next time on King of the World: 

Tina Khan (Amma)

I don’t know whether you remember or not, but I had a dream about it, that you were going to be lying in a ditch. I said this. “Lying in a ditch” was the word I used. 

King of the World is a production of Rifelion Media. Today’s show was produced by me and Asad Butt, with sound design and sound mixing by Mark Annotto. Lindsy Gamble was our associate producer. We had production help from Isabel Havens, Mona Baloch, and Erica Rife. Theme song by me with production help, mixing, and mastering by Nick Zampiello. Original music by Simon Hutchinson. Special thanks to Anna Chang, Eric Molinsky, Mr. Green, my friends Jay and Eric, my cousins Saadia and Mehru, and of course, my family—Amma, Agha, Meryum, and Noona. To learn more about the series check out our website: www.rifelion.com. Thanks for listening. I’m Shahjehan Khan.