Daily Inspiration Quote by Juan Cole

September 11 didn’t just redraw geopolitics; it created an instant market for “Islamic world” expertise, often fueled by fear, grief, and a media cycle hungry for quick explanations. Juan Cole’s line captures that pivot with the weary clarity of someone who watched a specialized field get yanked into the center of American public life overnight. The phrase “the public was suddenly interested” is pointedly neutral, almost clinical, and that’s the tell: it softens what was, in practice, a frantic demand to make sense of a newly branded enemy.

Cole’s intent is partly autobiographical, but it’s also a quiet argument about what public scholarship is for. He’s not claiming the spotlight; he’s describing being drafted into it. “Responsibility” does a lot of work here. As a professor “at a public university,” he signals an institutional ethic: taxpayers fund knowledge not just to circulate within journals, but to be deployed when the country is confused, vulnerable, and prone to bad shortcuts. The subtext is that misinformation was already rushing in to fill the vacuum, and that silence from experts can become complicity.

The context matters: post-9/11 America saw a surge in surveillance, wars framed as civilizational, and a flattening of “Islam” into a single, suspect category. Cole’s formulation pushes back without grandstanding. He doesn’t romanticize the moment; he underscores the stakes of explanation when curiosity is entangled with suspicion. The line is a small manifesto for translating complexity under pressure.