After 9/11, Islamophobia shaped a generation of Muslim New Yorkers

NEW YORK — Once-friendly neighbors started to keep their distance. Undercover police officers began to monitor community events. And passersby would give them dirty looks on the street, and sometimes harass them, when they left home in hijabs or other religious garb.

Many American Muslims have faced a quarter-century of suspicion and hostility since the Sept. 11 attacks, which reshaped life for all Americans.

In New York, a generation of Muslim New Yorkers responded to the Islamophobia by organizing their communities. Mosques hosted makeshift legal clinics. Small businesses became hubs in a citywide civil rights network. Muslims of different racial, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds formed alliances the city had not seen before.

Their political organizing helped, years later, to elect the city’s first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani. But anti-Muslim prejudice endures, echoing the Islamophobia that arose in the earliest days after Sept. 11.

Murad Awawdeh was 14 in September 2001. The post-9/11 backlash, and the grassroots response of his friends and neighbors, led him to trade his biochemistry studies — and his mother’s American dream of having a doctor in the family — for a career in civil rights.

“I think that day belongs to everyone who lived it and what came after belongs to a smaller group of us,” said Awawdeh, 39, who is now the president and chief executive of the New York Immigration Coalition and a confidant of Mamdani. “That part of the story this country still has not told itself honestly.”

The Sept. 11 attacks left many Muslim American communities scarred by heavy-handed law enforcement tactics and the suspicion, if not outright hostility, of classmates, co-workers, elected officials and cable news commentators who blamed all Muslims for the terrorism they, too, had experienced that day. That experience spurred many to take political action.

“If you look at prior to 9/11, for the most part, Muslim Americans were not politically involved,” said Afaf Nasher, the executive director of the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. But, she added, “When you’re pushed against the wall, you’re either going to run in fear or you’re going to push back, and political empowerment was certainly one way that we are pushing back.”

The ascent of Mamdani has turned New York into perhaps the most prominent example of American Muslim success in the post-9/11 world. But the history of the city since the attacks has also highlighted the many challenges that Muslims in the United States continue to face.

Those include a history of police surveillance, backlash faced by high-profile Muslims in politics or the arts, and attacks on Islamic religious expression, including the construction of mosques and the wearing of religious clothing such as hijabs. Those biases have also affected followers of other faiths, in particular observant Sikh men, whose turbans are often mistaken for a form of Islamic dress.

Such sentiments have compounded in many ways since the start of the war in the Gaza Strip, which most Muslim Americans have vigorously opposed. Opponents of that war have been accused of terrorist sympathies, and some, including Columbia University protester Mahmoud Khalil, have been arrested and threatened with deportation for their advocacy. That has led some Muslims to say the war in Gaza has created an environment akin to the months and years after Sept. 11, when Muslim Americans feared that they could be marked as terrorist sympathizers for speaking out against the war on terror.

After Sept. 11, many Muslims in New York found themselves under covert police surveillance. Asad Dandia, 33, a public historian, was a plaintiff in a 2013 class-action lawsuit against the Police Department over its surveillance of the city’s Muslim neighborhoods, a program that was assisted by the CIA.

He had come under police surveillance after starting a charity as a teenager to feed poor families in his neighborhood. The police spying program was exposed in 2011 and caused a public uproar that led to its ending by 2018 after a series of legal settlements and other initiatives.

Today, Dandia is the official historian of the borough of Brooklyn and an informal adviser to Mamdani. One of his lawyers in the 2013 lawsuit, Ramzi Kassem, is the mayor’s chief legal counsel.

“We went in the span of 10 years from suing the government to being the government,” Dandia said. “And I think that is a classic and quintessential New York and American story.”

Mamdani is one of several Muslims who have become prominent in American public life in recent years. Others include Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, Academy Award-winning actor Mahershala Ali, model Bella Hadid, and comedians Ramy Youssef and Hasan Minhaj.

“Muslim America now has a greater cultural footprint, more institutional power and a lot more support from allies, comrades and friends all throughout the country,” Dandia said. “Now when people think of Muslim America, they have names and faces they can point to.”

But despite these successes, many challenges remain. Mamdani, who was 9 on Sept. 11, has said the Islamophobic backlash to the attack lingered and “became a fact of life.”

According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted this year, 43% of American adults said Muslims are less patriotic than other Americans, and 42% said Muslim Americans are having a negative impact on the country. When asked to explain their views, respondents often cited the Sept. 11 attacks.

By some measures, the survey showed that public attitudes toward Islam were more negative now than they were immediately after the attacks. In March 2002, 25% of American adults said Islam was more likely than other religions to encourage violence, but that number rose to 51% in the survey conducted this year.

Those views have become highly polarized, with Republicans expressing far more negative views of Islam than Democrats, a change from after the attacks when supporters of both parties held similar views. Today, anti-Muslim sentiments have surged anew in some parts of the country with almost every election cycle.

Donald Trump campaigned for president in 2016 on a pledge to bar immigrants from Muslim countries and has restricted immigration from those nations and others that he views negatively during both his first and second administrations. In his second term, Trump has cracked down on students and universities over protests against the war in Gaza, portraying student demonstrators as supporters of terrorism and equating their arguments with antisemitic hate speech.

That has included the arrest of young Muslim activists, including Khalil at Columbia and Rumeysa Ozturk, who helped write an opinion piece critical of Israel for the student newspaper at Tufts University.

Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, a professor of religion and politics at Washington University in St. Louis, said the embrace of Islamophobia by the Trump administration posed a serious threat to Muslim Americans. But for Americans who are skeptical or critical of Trump, it may have also helped to undermine anti-Muslim arguments.

“People forget now the degree to which Islamophobia was not something that was just on the right but was present on both sides,” GhaneaBassiri said.

As an example of the reaction to Trump’s policies, he pointed to protests at airports against the president’s immigration restrictions in 2017 as a moment that “kind of shocked” some Muslim activists and organizations. They had become accustomed to pushing for their rights with few allies and little positive coverage in the news media, but the airport protests were filled with non-Muslims.

“Before that moment, if they criticized the state, their loyalty was always questioned by people on both the right and the left,” GhaneaBassiri said.

But in New York, Mamdani’s election has shown the resilience of anti-Muslim suspicion in both parties.

During last year’s mayoral campaign, Mamdani was accused of supporting terrorism by critics in both parties, including the campaign of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, his main rival in the race, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who apologized after she falsely claimed in an interview that he had made “references to global jihad.”

The hate is nothing new to the mayor’s allies. Shahana Hanif, who in 2021 was the first Muslim woman elected to the New York City Council, was in elementary school when the attacks took place. She came of age as American policy and cultural attitudes shifted against the nation’s Muslims.

At age 10, she wrote a letter to President George W. Bush asking him to put a stop to the hate that seemed to engulf so much of the country. For Hanif, a Bangladeshi native of Brooklyn, it was an early form of organizing that helped inform her political career decades later.

“Seeing the injustice my community experienced” propelled her into progressive political organizing, Hanif said. “I can’t take away the Muslim part of it and just say, ‘Oh, no, this is only happening to us because we’re Bangladeshi immigrants,’ or ‘This is only happening to us because I’m a daughter of immigrants or I’m a woman of color,’” she said. “That association of being Muslim is certainly part of it.”

New York’s Muslim political and civil rights leaders said they also saw opportunities to keep building on their post-9/11 organizing work.

Nasher, the executive director of CAIR, said that her group and others like it saw their efforts as an outgrowth of the discrimination they faced and a way to guard against its happening to others.

“That’s not just because we’re Muslim — it’s because we’re American,” she said. “And you would think that as our fellow Americans, people would want every American to be politically engaged.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.