The short answer to the question as posed is, Yes, of course, 9/11 changed the field of Middle East studies. However, the next question we need to ask is, In what ways have the events of 9/11 (and all that they set in motion, in the United States and internationally, including the U.S. invasion of Iraq) actually affected our work as scholars, students, teachers, resource specialists, and so forth, whose primary focus is the Middle East and/or the Muslim world, as well as the institutions, networks, and field(s) with which we are engaged? Space limitations allow me to offer only a few brief thoughts.

Middle East studies in the United States is a diverse and in many ways fragmented field, so (as always) we need to specify whom and what we are talking about. For a start, let us briefly consider the impact of 9/11 on scholars' research agendas. A good many scholars, perhaps especially those who focus on the premodern period, have more or less continued to do what they were doing before 9/11. That seems reasonable to me, despite criticism by those who insist that it is scholars' patriotic duty to snap to attention, put aside their own research, and try to produce knowledge that will help the current administration implement its policies more effectively—however misguided and counterproductive we might feel those policies to be.

In contrast, I am confident that the great majority of scholars who focus on some aspect or region of the modern and contemporary Middle East or Muslim world have felt the need to incorporate some cogent analysis of the antecedents, significance, and consequences of the 9/11 attacks into their thinking (and, of course, into their teaching and their outreach activities as well). However, whether this affects their research agendas, and if so, how, depends very much on what it is they are studying. It is certainly the case that a good many scholars in this country have responded to 9/11 and its aftermath by devoting considerable time and energy to research and writing on Islamism, on the origins, meaning, and consequences of 9/11, or on U.S. involvement in the Middle East. Hence the great outpouring of scholarly as well as popular books and articles that bear on these topics, along with innumerable conference papers, lectures, and panel discussions.

Ironically, this response has helped fuel the assault to which U.S. Middle East studies has been subjected since 2001, orchestrated by a small set of individuals and organizations based almost exclusively outside the academy and apparently well-equipped with websites, e-mail lists, and funding. They have sought to exploit the post-9/11 atmosphere of crisis, threat, and war to try to intimidate and silence scholars who have explicitly or implicitly challenged the ideological underpinnings of the “global war on terror” by providing complex, judicious, and historically grounded understandings of what is going on in the Muslim world and of the role of the United States in it, hence the unprecedentedly nasty attacks on leading scholars and on institutions of higher education for allegedly being apologists for terrorism, enemies of Israel, anti-Semitic, unpatriotic, suppressive of students' free-speech rights, and so on, along with efforts to impose political criteria on federal support for Middle East studies.

Although a great many people have spoken out and organized against these McCarthy-esque tactics, which constitute a direct assault on academic freedom and democratic intellectual life, there can be no doubt that this campaign has had at least some of the chilling effect that its perpetrators hoped to achieve. This, too, is ironic, because it comes at a time when scholars (especially younger scholars) in U.S. Middle East studies are producing a lot of extraordinarily smart and sophisticated work (much of it potentially relevant to policymaking) and participating more actively than ever in scholarly conversations across the disciplines.

The post-9/11 surge of interest in the Middle East and Islam among college and university students has also led to larger enrollments in courses relating to these topics, and in language courses as well. This has heightened pressures on teaching capacity but also resulted in greater employment opportunities, perhaps especially for recent PhDs in Middle East history, political science, and Islamic studies, and for language teachers too. At the same time, since 9/11 Middle East studies scholars have been busier than ever sharing their expertise and experience with significantly wider audiences, within their home institutions but also outside academia, through public lectures and panels, op-ed essays, media interviews, blogs, and so forth.

This is a good thing, and we must hope that it will continue and even expand in the years ahead. However, so far, at least, we scholars and teachers have had only a limited impact (with some exceptions) on the general public and on debates currently raging about how best to make sense of what is going on in the Middle East and about U.S. policy there. Middle East specialists based in think tanks have continued to play a much more influential role in shaping the dominant discourse in the media and among the political class, although that discourse would clearly benefit a great deal from the deep knowledge of social, cultural, and historical contexts; judicious analyses; and personal experience that college- and university-based scholars could offer. Finding more effective ways of sharing what we know and how we think about things, and of injecting our perspectives into public debates, remains one of the most important challenges that academic Middle East studies will continue to face in the years ahead.