After the September 11th attacks, friendly neighbors began to keep their distance from each other. Undercover police agents started monitoring community events, and passersby sometimes displayed aggression or stared intently at people leaving their homes in hijabs or other religious attire.
Many American Muslims faced suspicion and hostility for a quarter-century following the September 11th attacks, which changed the lives of all Americans. In New York, the Muslim generation responded to Islamophobia by organizing their communities. Mosques provided temporary legal consultations, and small businesses turned into centers of the city's civil rights network. Muslims from various racial, ethnic, and linguistic groups formed alliances that were previously unseen in the city.
Their political activism years later contributed to the election of the city's first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Nevertheless, anti-Muslim prejudices persist, reflecting the Islamophobia that arose in the first days after September 11th.
Murad Avade was a 14-year-old teenager in September 2001. The societal reaction after 9/11 and the response of his friends and neighbors at the grassroots level prompted him to abandon his biochemistry studies—and his mother's dream of having a doctor in the family—for a career in civil rights.
Avade, now president and CEO of the New York Immigrant Coalition and a confidant of Mamdani, stated: 'I think this day belongs to everyone who lived through it, and what followed belongs to a smaller group of us. This part of the country's history has not yet been told honestly.'
The September 11th attacks left many Muslim communities in America traumatized by harsh law enforcement tactics and suspicions, as well as open hostility from classmates, colleagues, elected officials, and cable news commentators who blamed all Muslims for the terrorist acts.
This experience pushed many toward taking political action. Afaf Nashar, executive director of the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, noted that before September 11th, Muslims were largely uninvolved in political life. However, she added that when you are cornered, you either run in fear or you resist, and political empowerment became one way of such resistance.
Mamdani's rise made New York perhaps the most prominent example of American Muslim success in the post-9/11 world. But the city's history since the attacks has also highlighted numerous ongoing challenges faced by Muslims in the United States.
These issues include the history of police surveillance, the negative reaction faced by prominent Muslims in politics or the arts, and attacks on Islamic religious expression, including mosque construction and wearing religious clothing like hijabs. These prejudices have also affected followers of other faiths, particularly observant Sikhs whose turbans are often mistaken for Islamic attire.
Such sentiments have intensified significantly since the start of the war in Gaza, which the majority of American Muslims strongly condemned. Opponents of this war were accused of sympathizing with terrorism, and some, including Mahmud Khalil, a protester at Columbia University, were arrested and threatened with deportation for their support. This led some Muslims to state that the war in Gaza created an atmosphere similar to the months and years after September 11th, when American Muslims feared being labeled as sympathizers of terrorism for speaking out against the war on terror.
After September 11th, many Muslims in New York found themselves under covert police surveillance. Asad Dandia, a historian and columnist, was a plaintiff in a 2013 class-action lawsuit against the Police Department over surveillance of the city's Muslim neighborhoods, a program supported by the CIA.
He came under police surveillance after founding a charity to help poor families in his neighborhood during his youth. The police surveillance program was exposed in 2011, causing public outcry that led to its termination by 2018 following a series of settlements and other initiatives.
Today, Dandia is the official historian of Borough Park and an unofficial advisor to Mamdani. One of his lawyers in the 2013 lawsuit, Ramzi Kassem, holds the position of chief legal counsel to the mayor.
Dandia noted: 'We went from litigation against the government to working in the government in 10 years. And I think that is the classic and quintessential story of New York and America.'
Mamdani is one of several Muslims who have become visible in American public life in recent years. Other such figures include Congress members Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, Oscar-winning actor Mahershala Ali, model Bella Hadid, and comedians Rami Yusuf and Hasan Minaj.
Dandia emphasized: 'Now, American Muslims have a greater cultural footprint, more institutional power, and much more support from allies, comrades, and friends across the country. Now, when people think of American Muslims, they have names and faces to point to.'
Despite these successes, serious difficulties remain. Mamdani, who was 9 years old on the day of the attacks, stated that the Islamophobic reaction to the attack lingered and 'has become a fact of life.'
According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted this year, 43 percent of American adults believe that Muslims are less patriotic than other Americans, and 42 percent claim that Muslims negatively impact the country. When explaining their views, respondents often cited the September 11th attacks.
By some metrics, the survey showed that public attitudes towards Islam are now more negative than immediately after the attacks. In March 2002, 25 percent of American adults believed that Islam was more likely to encourage violence, whereas in this year's survey, that figure rose to 51 percent.
These views have become extremely polarized: Republicans express a significantly more negative attitude toward Islam than Democrats, which differs from the situation after the attacks when supporters of both parties held similar views. Today, anti-Muslim sentiment is resurging in parts of the country almost every election cycle.
Donald Trump ran for president in 2016 promising to ban immigration from Muslim countries and restricting immigration from these countries and others he viewed negatively, during both his first and second terms. During his second term, Trump tightened control over students and universities due to protests against the war in Gaza, portraying student demonstrators as supporters of terrorism and equating their arguments with antisemitic hate speech.
This included arrests of young Muslim activists, including Khalil in Columbia and Rumaysa Ozturk, who helped write an editorial criticizing Israel for the Tufts University student newspaper. Kambiz Ganeabassiri, a professor of religion and politics at the University of Washington in St. Louis, stated that the adoption of Islamophobia by the Trump administration poses a serious threat to American Muslims. However, for Americans skeptical of or critical of Trump, this could also help undermine anti-Muslim arguments.
Ganeabassiri noted: 'People forget how Islamophobia wasn't just a right-wing phenomenon, but was present on both sides.'
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