On Sept. 11, 2001, I was an unsuspecting high school junior whose life changed on that fateful day. That morning, Islam became synonymous with terrorism in much of the American public’s collective imagination.
As awareness of Islam and its adherents grew in the aftermath of the attacks, so did the suspicion. The lens through which people viewed and understood Muslims increasingly narrowed around national security and terrorism. The Muslim part of my multi-hyphenated identity gained outsize attention, too. Although I have always been surrounded by kind and mostly tolerant neighbors, the effects of widespread Islamophobia have touched my life intimately. In 2012 a man shot at my local mosque while 500 worshippers prayed inside. A few years later, as Donald Trump campaigned on a “Muslim ban,” a patient refused my medical care in the wake of suicide bombings in Brussels.
Calls for the exclusion of Muslims and Islam from the country’s social tapestry are routinely peddled at the highest levels of government.
Sept. 11 “made Muslims visible in the United States in a way that they had never been before,” Rozina Ali, journalist and author of “Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America,” told me. “Before 9/11, Muslims were primarily Black, brown, immigrant or something else that was a primary identity marker. After 9/11, they were considered Muslim and became visible in the cultural, social and political scene.”
Even 25 years after 9/11, Islamophobia remains a mainstream feature in American politics. Disgusting Islamophobic statements have been routinely uttered at the highest levels of government. And though the political rise of both Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed has challenged a bigoted glass ceiling, many of the attacks against them remind us of the continued chasm between the nation’s ideals and its sobering reality.
After the attacks, President George W. Bush maintained that “Islam is peace” and “terror is not the true faith of Islam.” At least in rhetoric, then, the humanity and belonging of Muslims in America were preserved. In the quarter century since, American Muslims have had some remarkable successes in gaining representation. A report published last month by the Council on American-Islamic Relations tabulated “a record-breaking 255 Muslim elected officials serving across 26 states.” That number has since grown by one, as Aisha Wahab was sworn in as the fifth Muslim member of the current House of Representatives. Beyond Washington, Muslims are flourishing across the professional spectrum, from Hollywood to sports to medicine.
But even under Bush, the federal government surveilled mosques, conducted mass arrests and used a registry called NSEERS to track and deport thousands from mostly Muslim-majority countries. Additionally, the Bush White House oversaw warrantless wiretapping, established the Department of Homeland Security and consolidated the power of the executive branch. In ushering in Bush’s war on terror, as Asma Khalid writes in The Atlantic, 9/11 forever altered not only “how the United States interacted with Muslims abroad and at home; it also changed our collective view of American values around citizenship, identity, and civil liberties.”
A Pew Research Center survey conducted in May found that 43% of U.S. adults believed Muslims to be less patriotic than other Americans.
And since Bush’s tenure, this gentler rhetoric has been supplanted by vitriol. Islamophobia is hitting deafening decibels for a flurry of reasons, including the war in Gaza and politicians reaching for hate and bigotry when so many voters disapprove of the Trump administration’s policies.
Prominent elected officials have regularly made their bile for Muslims known without censure. In March, Rep. Randy Fine of Florida called for “more Islamophobia, not less.” Last month, Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina called any Muslim in public office “a Trojan horse” and “a threat to both national security and our republic.” Finally, Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama has posted images of Mamdani and the 9/11 attacks with the caption “The enemy is inside the gates.”
“Islamophobia has been manufactured and encouraged in society. It has been rationalized under the guise of national security and the war on terror,” Ali said. “But the flavor has changed. Today policymakers are saying we should ban Islam altogether from this country, which is a remarkable cry from where we were 25 years ago.”
Unfortunately, the lawmakers’ words have traction with the public. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in May found that 43% of U.S. adults believed Muslims to be less patriotic than other Americans, and 42% said Muslim Americans were having a negative effect on the country. More than 50% of respondents said Islam encouraged violence more than other religions; in March 2002, six months after 9/11, that figure sat at 25%.
In May of this year, a mass shooting at a San Diego mosque left three dead. In Texas, where Muslims make up just 2% of the state’s population, Republican consultants told The New York Times that Islam had eclipsed the U.S. border as the major concern for GOP voters. State leaders, including Gov. Greg Abbott, have launched investigations into Muslim groups and tried to limit Islamic practice in public. Nationally, though Mamdani and El-Sayed are now political supernovas, the attacks against them are laced with the basest forms of Islamophobia: suggestions that El-Sayed has sinister aims or terrorist affiliations, and contrived uproar over Mamdani’s attendance of 9/11 ceremonies.
Twenty-five years on from 9/11, we are yet to recoup what was lost on that day and beyond. Islamophobia is just one manifestation of this. Moreover, other creations of previous administrations, like Immigration and Customs Enforcement and “material support” laws, are now being weaponized and deployed by the Trump administration against other groups.
“It’s a much broader project. Islamophobia is not just a Muslim issue,” Ali said. “It is an American issue. Islamophobia is challenging how we think about freedom of religion, how we think about tolerance, how we think about accepting difference in this country.”
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