(RNS) — About a week after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 — four days of which I stayed in our Midtown Manhattan apartment being too scared to go outside, unable to leave the island to go to my parents’ place in Maryland because the bridges and tunnels in and out of the borough were shut down — I got on the subway and headed downtown as close as I could safely get to Ground Zero to begin reporting.
One of the first stories I reported was how Muslim students at New York University were dealing with the aftermath. Six dorms housing about 2,000 students in a 20-block radius of Ground Zero had been evacuated. Students were scared, with one young Muslim woman sharing her fears she would be pushed onto subway tracks.
I’ve thought about those students at times throughout my career — they were barely a few years younger than me. Some of the students I interviewed that day have gone on to become prominent imams, authors, commentators and other public-facing “career Muslims.”
I can’t think of a more defining way to start one’s career. I was a few years out of journalism school and hired (one month before 9/11) as an arts and culture reporter for a Muslim-focused digital media site. The intersection of 9/11 and the lives of American Muslims became my de facto beat, one that I am still covering in some way, shape or form 25 years later.
And while my commitment to reporting on and coordinating coverage of Muslim communities has remained consistent, the state of Muslim communities in America has fluctuated enormously in terms of power, authority and belonging. Muslim communities entered into a charged post-9/11 landscape and discourse and grappled with proving their Americanness, engaging in apologetics tours for things that needed no sweeping apologies, dealing with the surveillance of their spaces and chasing what often turned out to be performative allies.
“When you look at it from the 9/11 perspective, (Muslim American communities have) made some gains. We have more leaders who are Muslim; we have more Muslims in pop culture, although not completely representative,” said Zainab Chaudry, executive vice president of New Heights Communication. Chaudry spent a large part of the past 10 years working in rapid response, crisis communications and strategic messaging with coalitions at the intersection of national security and civil liberties.
While there has been some shift in discourse around Muslims, Chaudry said, “the underlying belief of Islamophobia in this country can be reignited at any moment,” which is evident since President Donald J. Trump took office in his second term.
Conditional acceptance of Muslims as Americans in the immediate years after 9/11 often hinged on their ability to provide something good or be a model minority. As former President Bill Clinton said at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, “If you’re a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make a future together.”
Meant to serve as a contrast to then-Republican presidential candidate Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and threat of a travel ban, Clinton’s comment drew criticism from various civil rights groups that pointed out a conditional acceptance of American Muslims: Help us fight terrorism to be considered a good Muslim. Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate further amplified this by stating several times on the campaign trail and in her nomination acceptance speech that American Muslims served “as a vital frontline defense against homegrown radicalization.”
This problematic framing of American Muslims grew from many things: years of inter-community and intra-Muslim battles around countering violent extremism programs (CVE) spearheaded during President Barack Obama’s administration; surveillance programs targeting Muslims (particularly the New York Police Department investigations of Muslims, which according to the Brennan Center for Justice, broke 95 percent of court-imposed rules regarding government surveillance programs around political activity); and internal pressures to issue large-scale apologies whenever any acts of terror occurred around the world.
A lot of my reporting and stories I edited in the first 15 years after 9/11 explored these questions: Should Muslims seek a seat at the proverbial table, and what strings came attached with that seat? And if not, do Muslim communities have the political and societal strength to influence policy and execute their own strategies and solutions? How can this strength be gained? Did they have authentic allies in place to build toward intersectional goals, or were these relationships more performative and transactional?
Chaudry said that one of the main problems Muslim communities continue to face since 9/11 was the failure to understand that communications is a long-term strategy rather than just advancing the kind of messaging to hopefully solidify Muslim Americans as unconditional threads of the American fabric. Who does that messaging serve?
“We’re trying to do persuasion instead of doing psychology,” she said. “And more and more because of the way algorithms serve us certain things, people’s perceptions are being shaped (in non-political spaces) before we even enter the room.”
Trump’s campaign and presidency in 2016 were a true test for Muslim American communities as fundamental breakdowns began to occur. While Muslim communities have since had successes in building political power and institutional strengths, understanding people’s psychologies around how they are influenced continues to be a challenge.
“People showed up at the airport in 2017 (when the so-called Muslim ban was enacted), but narrative wasn’t taken seriously as a strategy. We had an advocacy strategy, we had a legal strategy, but we did not do the work of having public opinion on our side,” Chaudry said. “We had the ability to make a lot of connections and build solidarity between a lot of groups. But what I’ve seen since then is a breakdown of that solidarity. It’s very easy to pick people off the margins in various demographics.”
A movement between Trump’s first and second terms grew from Muslim and other minority communities coalescing around grassroots initiatives to run for office (or stump for candidates who purported to support their concerns) and stand together in opposition to various Trump initiatives. But between the COVID-19 pandemic, the killing of approximately 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, the ensuing bombing campaign in Gaza (with the death toll surpassing 75,000 and its declaration as a genocide by the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry) and most recently the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, a significant shift occurred within and around Muslim American communities.
As the politics and fear of division strengthened its grip on the country during Trump’s second term, what has also emerged is a doggedly stronger and more unapologetic and authentic ownership of what it means to be Muslim American during what are arguably harder times.
Muslim communities are dealing with the resurgence of numerous Republican leaders who push scare tactics around Shariah law taking over the country or vilify Islam as a political entity and not a religion. Various members of political office — at local, state and national levels — are hurling vicious anti-Muslim directives. One can look to Texas as the case study for the intense ramping up of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim measures.
Pushing back against all this continues to be a grind. “Do you want to know why I get mad? We are in the same struggle now that we were after 9/11,” Chaudry said. “We haven’t changed deeper psychology, and that … is not to make people more comfortable in our presence. That’s not our job.”
What has deepened is the continuous perpetuation of the idea that “somehow Muslims are violent, as well as deep-seated misconceptions about how Islam is somehow an evil religion,” she said. “Just listen to how (Vice President) JD Vance talks about (Michigan Democratic Senatorial candidate Abdul) El-Sayed — hinting at evil ideology. I think people have forgotten that this is not an “us versus them” story, that Muslim Americans are not outside of the story. We’ve had to deal with 9/11 and how it impacted our lives, too.”
And while the current climate in the United States for Muslims is perhaps worse now than the immediate years post 9/11, what also is different is steady growth in political strength and advocacy work, a stronger sense of self and a greater understanding of who truly is willing to build with Muslim American communities. One can consider the impact of student protesters in 2024, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s (D-Mich.) congressional battles, Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral success in New York or Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign in Michigan.
A few months ago I interviewed Haris Tarin, vice president of policy and programming for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, who said that Muslim American communities are more rooted now than post 9/11. From what I can see in my years on this beat, he’s right. “That is why Islamophobia is (now) more intense, because they know that American Muslims now have a little more influence,” he said. “They are able to push back, whether it’s at the ballot box or (through) litigation or in advocacy, or in the purchasing and buying power of American Muslims.” And above all, they hold onto hope.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, hope is a valuable commodity in current times. If there is one thing reporting on Muslim American communities for the past 25 years has taught me, it’s that looking at what the next generation is doing, rejecting, burning to the ground and building afresh is one of the best indicators of what may be to come.
(Dilshad D. Ali is a freelance journalist. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)
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