Hear what these Arab Americans think of their country 25 years after the Sept. 11 attacks.
By Noreen O’Donnell Published September 11, 2026 • Updated on September 11, 2026 at 2:17 pm
Muslim Americans are still met with suspicion and distrust 25 years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, even as they become more politically visible in the U.S.
Forty-three percent of U.S. adults think Muslims are less patriotic than other Americans, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey, while 42% said Muslims were having a negative impact on the country. Some of those surveyed attributed their opinions to the terrorist attacks.
But New York City now has its first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and he represented the city at the World Trade Center ceremony marking the attacks.
As the country remembers the tragedy, NBC talked to some Arab Americans about how they view their country today.
Here are their stories.
Click below for each of the profiles or keep scrolling to read them all.
Moustafa Bayoumi
Moustafa Bayoumi thought, after the Sept. 11 attacks, that too little attention was being paid to what was happening in the Muslim American community.
Men who were not citizens and who were mostly from Muslim-majority countries were required to register with the federal government. The New York City Police Department was operating a secret program spying on mosques and community centers that continued until lawsuits forced them to end.
“There was a sense of siege that really confronted the community,” he said.
Bayoumi, a professor of English at the City University of New York’s Brooklyn College, decided to interview young Arab Americans about their lives in Brooklyn post-Sept.11. The result was a book of seven portraits, “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem: Being Young and Arab in America,” published in 2008. (The question is taken from W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Souls of Black Folk.”)
Bayoumi, who was born in Switzerland and raised in Canada, was hopeful afterward though he wrote that young Arab Americans faced workplace discrimination, government surveillance, the disappearance of family and friends and other threats. But they understood the adversities and their opportunities, he said.
Twenty-five years after Sept. 11, he thinks the Muslim community in America has found a place in society. What hasn’t changed is Islamophobia. U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, the Republican from South Carolina, for example, last month called every Muslim office holder a “Trojan horse” and a threat to national security.
“In fact, I would say that it’s probably more prevalent today,” he said.
That Muslim Americans have been able to prosper despite slurs like hers is because they organized, Bayoumi said. When Muslim Americans learned about the New York Police Department’s blanket surveillance program, they brought a number of lawsuits to force the department to reform. The Muslim Democratic Club of New York was created, which began to have a presence in elections in New York City.
“And one of their members was a young, political upstart by the name of Zohran Mamdani,” he said. “People may not see that on the outside, but these are the kinds of things that have been happening.”
When politicians such as Gov. Gregg Abbott of Texas and Gov. Rick De Santis of Florida back legislation singling out Muslims, Bayoumi sees that as a reaction to the success of Muslim Americans. Abbott signed a law preventing housing developments from using religious rules such as sharia, what he called sharia compounds, in response to a planned development with a mosque at its center. De Santis signed one banning sharia in state courts. Critics said both were anti-Muslim.
“I’m already bracing myself for the midterm elections,” Bayoumi said. “There is going to be plenty of this kind of rhetoric going around.”
The change in attitude about Israelis and Palestinians — a Gallup poll from February found that 41% of Americans say they sympathize more with Palestinians compared to 36% who sympathize more with Israelis — is now part of a larger political reckoning, where young people are rejecting older gatekeepers, he said. Americans’ response to the destruction of Gaza after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks in Israel has prompted other political questions.
“People are seeing that we actually have to open up our politics, not just at a foreign policy question,” he said. “And so that puts, again, Muslim Americans, Arab Americans and especially Palestinian Americans at the center of that conversation.”
Razan Bayan
Razan Bayan was about 7 when a teacher told her class that throughout American history, different groups had been targeted for discrimination: Black people, Jewish people and now Muslims. She remembered envisioning a target on her back.
“I don’t today necessarily agree with the framing of history as waves of hate,” she said. “There’s definitely a historical continuity of things like racism and anti-Semitism that haven’t necessarily ended. But It is very distinct in my memory, the word target.”
Bayan hadn’t been born when the Sept. 11 attacks took place. Her mother was still pregnant with her. She first learned of them when she was 4 or so when her mother told her that because the hijackers were Muslim, many people blamed all Muslims for what had happened.
As a child, she hadn’t faced direct Islamophobia, but after being told that there were people who did not like Muslims, she felt danger for the first time, she said.
Bayan, who was born and raised in Dallas, attended Islamic school until she enrolled at Southern Methodist University and now Notre Dame University. She is a third-year Ph.D. student in peace studies and history. She has been focusing on state violence against Muslims during the Bush administration’s war on terror, particularly in the detentions centers at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. She examined what young Muslim Americans knew about Abu Ghraib.
“I found that, especially Abu Ghraib, there’s an incredible, collective amnesia there,” she said.
She notes that the election of Mayor Zohran Mamdani in New York City and Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Democratic Senate primary in Michigan were preceded by Muslim congresswomen such as Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. Muslim women broke the ground, she said.
“This is a wave of very confident Muslims who are very confident in their Muslim identity and who are not ashamed of their identity, their religious identity, and their politics and their critique of U.S. foreign policy,” she said.
Just a few years ago, a critique of U.S. policy in relation to Israel would have ended a political campaign, she said.
“And now we have candidates who are very openly making these critiques and very openly expressing their Muslim identity,” she said.
That it has triggered a backlash does not surprise her, said. Islamophobia in general has never gone away, she said. When she was in middle school, armed protestors showed up outside her school, where there was also a mosque. The children were escorted between classes by security guards. The former mayor of Irving in Dallas County, Beth Van Duyne, campaigned against sharia law; she is now Bayan’s representative in Congress.
But Islamophobia has also come from the left, she said, from accusations that Muslim politicians will mandate that women wear hijabs.
“Some of the most hurtful forms of Islamophobia and deeply personal forms of Islamophobia I have faced have come from people with very liberal politics,” she said.
Sami Akleh
In the spring of 2001, Sami Akleh joined the U.S. Marines.
An Arab Christian, he had grown up in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and was bored. The Marines promised brotherhood, a chance to meet foreign girls.
Until Sept. 11.
By February 2003, Akleh was on his way to Kuwait and then to Iraq, where one of his gunnery sergeants was killed by a mortar. He heard anti-Arab slurs from fellow service members, though said he could understand their anger after the attacks. He was angry too.
But during his two tours in Iraq he also became proud of his Arab heritage. At high school in Brooklyn, many of his classmates thought he was Hispanic and he had never felt particularly close to his family’s roots. His time in Iraq changed that.
His mother came to the U.S. from Egypt. His father was Palestinian, and Akleh is distantly related to the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American reporter for Al Jazeera who was shot and killed during an Israeli raid in the West Bank. The U.S. concluded Israeli military fire was likely responsible, but not intentional, infuriating Palestinians.
Asked what he thinks of an America where Zohran Mamdani can become mayor of New York but politicians in Texas run against what they call the “Islamification” of the state, Akleh immediately brought up one of the most talked about political races in the country: Michigan’s Senate contest.
Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate in August, sparking a torrent of anti-Muslim attacks. Born and raised in the Detroit suburbs, El-Sayed is a physician who ran the Detroit Health Department and the Wayne County’s Department of Health, Human and Veterans Services. Sen. Tommy Tuberville, the Trump ally running for governor of Alabama, immediately called him a “terrorist.”
El-Sayed and Mamdani both categorize Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide, a label Israel rejects, though El-Sayed has apologized for tying Israel’s killings in Lebanon with an attack on a Michigan synagogue.
Akleh thinks El-Sayed has successfully linked the amount the U.S. spends on military aid to Israel, more than $20 billion since the start of the war in Gaza in 2023, with the financial struggles of Americans who can’t afford to buy groceries or a home. Young people who feel distant from the American dream especially are hearing the message, he said.
“They’re touching on a point that is really connecting to those folks,” Akleh said. “And I think the other part is that is there’s still a bit of humanity left in this world. We’re seeing mass slaughter of folks, children, and I think it’s hard for anyone to stomach regardless of what side of the aisle you’re on.”
The way many Americans view Israel is the most unexpected change of the last 25 years, Akleh said. And that El-Sayed and Mamdani were able to win with voters shows the progress that’s been made, he said. Twenty-five years ago they would not even have been on a ballot.
“It is one of the positives that I do see,” Akleh said. “There’s some hope in that way that through all of the muck, we can see some light.”
At the same time, he wonders how well El-Sayed would do in a state like Florida or Georgia, not Michigan, with its large Arab population in Dearborn especially. Arab Americans make up about 2% the population in the state.
As far as Israel and Palestinians, Akleh said he had hoped for a two-state solution, but any solution now seems very far away.
Following Hamas’ attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, the single deadliest day in Israel’s history when about 1,200 people died, the Israeli military has razed swaths of Gaza and has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Israeli settlers are attacking Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
No violence is acceptable, Akleh said. But he also asked: Where do Palestinians go for justice?
“So just to have folks understand that viewpoint, there’s no avenue right now for Palestinians to find justice,” he said.
Akleh was featured in Moustafa Bayoumi’s book, “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem.” After he left the Marines, Akleh went back to college, to Brooklyn College and New York’s St. John’s University, and now works for a nonprofit organization. He is married with two children and owns a home in the New York City suburbs. He is more politically involved than he was, takes his daughter to protests against ICE, aware of his freedom to express his opinions. He describes himself as a centrist.
“Some of us are as American as you can get,” he said. “I do fantasy baseball for God’s sakes.”
Yasmin Dwedar
When Yasmin Dwedar was in high school in Brooklyn, at time when she covered her hair, she ran and won a position in student government. But she was forced to resign because as a Muslim, she could not attend the school dances. Board members were expected to be at all of the school functions.
Dwedar took on the school administration, eventually finding her way to a lawyer who now works for New York City. In the end, she not only assumed her place in student government, she was elected president.
“To win by a landslide as someone who grew up in an atmosphere of extreme Islamophobia and bigotry, even pre-9-11, it meant the world to me because it felt like the world was my oyster,” she said. “You can be anything you want to be. It doesn’t matter if you’re Muslim. It doesn’t matter that you’re Arab. It doesn’t matter if you cover your hair or if you don’t.”
Her story earned her a a chapter in Moustafa Bayoumi’s book, “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem,” a mention in Oprah’s O magazine — “a brave young woman who fought hard and earned the right to hold a student government office at her high school without having to compromise her religious principles” — and a career. She became a lawyer.
For Dwedar, Islamophobia has been out in the open, especially after Sept. 11. Kids pulled off her hijab and threw snowballs at her as she walked home, she said. She told herself they were just snowballs.
“But I cried the whole way home,” she said. “And there was something really heavy on my chest saying, ‘Well, they hate you because you’re Muslim.’”
Because she had experienced discrimination, she turned to social justice work as a lawyer, including at a crime victim nonprofit and as executive director at Vermont Legal Aid. Twenty-five years after Sept. 11, Islamophobia and extremism are still present, she said, but at the same time, people are frustrated with the status quo. And that has opened the door for politicians like Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan and New York City’s Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist.
Groceries, gas and rent are all expensive, she said. Universal healthcare, affordable education and higher wages are all popular positions.
“There’s this desire for someone who actually wants to work for the people, who wants to make a difference in people’s lives, who’s connected to the experience of everyday Americans,” she said.
She said that when Mamdani prevailed last year, after facing extreme Islamophobia and millions of dollars from super PACs opposing his candidacy, “every Muslim person felt that win.” New Yorkers are learning about Islam from him, she said.
During one interview, Mamdani’s independent opponent, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo appeared to laugh when a radio host said Mamdani would be “cheering” if “another 9/11” happened on his watch. A spokesperson for Cuomo’s campaign later denied he was agreeing with the comments.
“The Muslim community is not responsible for 9-11,” Dwedar said “But we bore the brunt of that from our childhood well into our adulthood.”
She said she slept by her radio, wondering what was going to happen next. The attacks were as traumatic for the Muslim community as for other Americans, she said, and Muslims were as much its victims.
One dramatic change since Sept. 11 has been social media. It offers an unfiltered, alternative perspective in a way that’s not controlled by large media outlets, she said.
Even in traditional media, “There’s been a greater representation in terms of reporters,” she said. “Sometimes I’ll turn on the TV when I’m visiting somewhere and I’ll see a Muslim woman wearing a hijab reporting and I’m like, ‘Wow.’”
Baher Azmy
On the day that Baher Azmy was interviewed about Islamophobia 25 years after the Sept. 11 attacks, he had just learned of a professional setback.
A $42 million jury verdict for torture that he had won against an American military contractor at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison had been overturned by a federal appeals panel. A recent Supreme Court decision had limited the rights of non-U.S. citizens to sue in federal court and his clients, all former prisoners in the early 2000s, were Iraqis.
“That’s just a huge blow,” Azmy said “It was the only case in the post-9-11 era where torture victims got to testify in front of a jury. All these cases get dismissed.”
Azmy is the legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City. He had represented the former prisoners — a journalist, a fruit vendor and a middle-school principal — who said they had been left overnight in a cold prison cell with a bag over their head or chained to a pipe or threatened with rape.
Among Azmy’s prominent legal cases right now are those he and others are bringing on behalf of Mahmoud Khalil, the most recognizable of the pro-Palestinian student protesters.
Khalil, the Columbia University graduate who mediated between the university and protestors after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, is a legal resident, but the Board of Immigration Appeals has approved his deportation. The White House accuses him of failing to report relevant information while obtaining his visa, which he denies. His lawyers, including Azmy, are planning to appeal to the Supreme Court.
“These are student protesters who the government has arrested, detained and is trying to deport for nothing other than their speech, criticizing Israel and U.S. foreign policy,” Azmy said.
Today, Azmy said, Islamophobia is entirely permissible. Peaceful protestors are labeled Hamas or terrorist sympathizers, he said. Political opponents mock the names of Muslim elected officials.
But one profound difference has been the political engagement by Muslims, he said. A lot of fear in the Muslim community immediately after Sept. 11 was understandable. More than 1,000 Arab and South Asian men were arrested in sweeps, held in detention for months and then most were deported for overstaying their visas. The new generation of Muslims are citizens, who know their rights and how to organize, he said. They understand how the country’s constitutional values are supposed to work.
“There’s this piece of America that really is regenerative,” he said.
Azmy is Muslim, born in Egypt and he came to the United States at the age of 4 in the mid-1970s. He grew up in Princeton, where his father was studying for a doctorate, and graduated from New York University Law School. On Sept. 11, he watched in horror from Brooklyn as the Twin Towers fell. He was frightened, like everyone else, he said.
He said he worried about a military retaliation, which then-president George W. Bush did order, first against Afghanistan and then asserting unproven allegations of weapons of mass destruction, against Iraq. After Sept. 11, Azmy’s background pushed him to stand up to what he calls the human rights crisis created by the Bush administration.
“He’s got this affable image of a watercolor painter, but George Bush is responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of people and displacing millions of others,” Azmy said.
Few organizations confronted the Bush administration initially — the Center for Constitutional Rights was the first to challenge the U.S. government’s right to hold detainees in Guantanamo Bay indefinitely — but in the years since then immigrant groups and Muslim organizations have gotten stronger and more responsive, he said. Muslim and Palestinian Americans should take a lesson from the Japanese American community, which organized over the decades until it received reparations for how Japanese Americans were treated during World War II, he said.
“U.S. history is not the sort of linear progress towards freedom,” he said “And this notion that after wartime repression, things snap back to the way they were is just historically wrong.
“I don’t think that’s the lesson from history,” he said. “And that’s not been the lesson post 9-11.”
Categories: America, COUNCIL ON AMERICAN ISLAMIC RELATION, Islamophobia, United States, USA