The post-9/11 infrastructure of Islamophobia

(RNS) — This week, Republicans are gathering for a midterm convention in Dallas, in my own backyard, immediately before the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11.

But angry demonstrators outside our mosques are not something that arrived with the convention. On Fridays, even without a national political gathering nearby, members of our community regularly encounter protesters when they come to pray.

As an American Muslim imam, I consider this setting as we approach this anniversary. Alongside the somber commemorations and historical retrospectives are the ordinary concerns of people wondering whether they can enter their mosque without being harassed.

For us, the legacy of Sept. 11 is not confined to a terrible morning. It includes the institutions, organizations and assumptions that took shape afterward.

Six days after the attacks, President George W. Bush visited the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., and declared: “Islam is peace.” He spoke about Muslim Americans as neighbors and warned against intimidating women wearing headscarves.

Sadly, that reassurance was not the whole record. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq he launched in the aftermath brought about extensive civilian suffering to Muslims and others abroad.

And at home, Muslim charities, imams and community leaders were viciously targeted. Bush used 9/11 not just in every speech, but seemingly to justify every unconstitutional attack on the Muslim community. And the tenuous relationship between Muslim communities and counterterrorism policy sadly was only further incentivized in the Countering Violent Extremism programs of the Obama administration.

Then in 2016, presidential candidate Donald Trump openly told CNN: “I think Islam hates us.” To me, it felt like the policies had already been speaking that way for some time, but the bigotry was now just out in the open. The industry got what it wanted: a full-blown Islamophobe as president.

The public-opinion record offers another comparison. In March 2002, six months after the attacks, 25% of Americans told Pew Research Center that Islam was more likely than other religions to encourage violence. This January, 51% said so. That is not a historical peak, as the figure reached 52% in 2016, but it is substantially higher than in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11.

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And this spring, 43% surveyed described Muslims as less patriotic than other Americans, while 42% said Muslim Americans have a negative impact on the country, according to Pew.

A quarter-century of living alongside Muslim neighbors has not apparently resolved those suspicions.

To understand this history, we have to look beyond individual prejudice. We have to examine its organization.

In its 2011 report “Fear, Inc.,” the Center for American Progress identified what it called an “Islamophobia network” connecting donors, policy organizations, media figures and activists who promote misrepresentations of Islam. Its investigation traced $42.6 million given from seven foundations and charitable groups to organizations in that network between 2001 and 2009. The report describes how misleading claims circulated among researchers, commentators and political organizers, including through model legislation concerning Islamic law.

Older institutions were joined by new organizations and projects: Campus Watch in 2002, Jihad Watch in 2003 and ACT for America in 2007. The network included websites, advocacy organizations and grassroots campaigns. 

A 2016 Council on American-Islamic Relations and University of California, Berkeley report identified 74 organizations it associated with Islamophobia, with 33 categorized as its core.

This is the organizational dimension of the story: It’s not simply what someone believes about Muslims, but how messages are funded, reproduced and distributed.

There is also a separate indispensable institutional history: the government’s reorganization after Sept. 11.

Consider the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency that haunts so many today. ICE is now so familiar that it can sound like a historical American institution. But neither ICE nor its overseer, the Department of Homeland Security, existed when Bush delivered his reassurance at that Washington mosque. Bush signed the Homeland Security Act in November 2002.

The reorganization brought together 22 federal agencies and components; ICE was established in 2003, inheriting investigative and enforcement functions from predecessor agencies. Immigration enforcement was much older; its consolidation inside this new homeland-security structure was not. The connection to Muslim communities was embedded from the start.

Long before Trump’s famous Muslim ban of 2017, the government introduced the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System in 2002. Its domestic registration requirements applied to certain male noncitizens ages 16 and older from 25 designated countries — overwhelmingly Muslim-majority nations, although religious identification was not a formal factor. Those who fit that description were required to report to the federal government for fingerprinting, photographs and questioning. Administration of the program transferred to DHS in 2003.

The institutions created during that period subsequently acquired additional resources and responsibilities. A law enacted last year provided ICE with an additional $45 billion for detention capacity and nearly $30 billion for purposes including personnel, transportation, technology and enforcement operations. (These are multiyear appropriations available through September 2029, not a single year’s operating budget.)

Those appropriations are not obvious donations to an anti-Muslim advocacy network. Nor does the agency’s founding date make every ICE pickup Islamophobic. But the historical point is more precise: Sept. 11 helped reshape the institutions through which the government administers immigration and security, with consequences extending far beyond Muslim communities.

The private advocacy network and the public security bureaucracy may be distinct histories, but both belong in an account of what the post-9/11 years produced.

Meanwhile, the debate about Muslims’ place in public life continues. Texas Reps. Keith Self and Chip Roy organized a congressional “Sharia Free America Caucus” earlier this year. Its members cite security concerns and the role of Islamic law in American life.

Muslim political visibility has also increased, giving fodder to their fear-mongering. Zohran Mamdani became New York City’s first Muslim mayor, and Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate nomination.

In August, U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, R-South Carolina, wrote: “Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic.”

After El-Sayed contrasted social isolation in America with the sense of community among his relatives in Egypt, Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Alabama, responded: “If you hate America so much, go live in Egypt.”

Mamdani is being told by some he’s not welcome to the 25-year anniversary ceremonies, as if to suggest he’s somehow complicit for being Muslim himself.

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And it’s not just Muslim politicians who are openly being told they’re not welcome here in the public space.

On Aug. 30, Mosab Hassan Yousef, the ex-Muslim supposed son of a Hamas cofounder, appeared at the Jewish American Summit in Los Angeles shouting “I don’t want Muslims in America. Get the f— out of the United States.” Sadly, the audience loudly applauded.

Mosab is a validator like so many strange ex-Muslims, unknown to our communities, who hit our screens after 9/11 to suggest that Muslims are indeed the problem, and Islam is incompatible with modern civilization. That same rhetoric of erasure then becomes real life.

After the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque attacks, I helped wash the bodies of Muslims who had been murdered in cold blood. That experience remains with me whenever the safety of our communities becomes a subject of public debate. Washing the dead is an act of tenderness that no terrorist or terror supporter seems to grasp.

But whatever abstractions surround a tragedy, there is nothing abstract about that responsibility. The terrorist cited Trump in his manifesto for a reason.

And in May of this year, three people were murdered in the same way at the Islamic Center of San Diego. The attackers’ writings cited the Christchurch murderer as an inspiration. The connection between these perpetrators was documented; it was not simply a resemblance between two tragedies.

Beyond the most devastating attacks are experiences that rarely become national news. It’s not always murder, but the conditions that have a whole industry to foment fear behind them working in overdrive.

CAIR recorded 8,683 civil rights complaints in 2025, its highest annual total on record. Those are complaints received by an advocacy organization, not a national count of verified hate crimes. They nevertheless document the volume of concerns being brought to one of the institutions Muslim Americans turn to for help.

No single statistic captures this anniversary. Some measures have worsened. Others have remained troublingly persistent. The institutional history, meanwhile, cannot be reduced to a temporary surge of fear that simply passed.

That is what I am trying to convey when I speak about the industrialization of Islamophobia: the need to examine not only hostile encounters, but the organizations, funding networks and repeated claims surrounding them, and to place those developments alongside the government’s documented post-9/11 record.

On 9/11, we will mourn the people murdered that morning and remember the families whose lives were permanently changed. That grief does not compete with my grief for Christchurch or San Diego, or the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in Afghanistan, Iraq or Yemen in the “war on terror” that followed.

And 25 years later, when a family walks into a mosque on Friday, they’re just asking to be left alone to pray. And part of what they pray for is a more peaceful and justice-filled world where the atrocities of 9/11 and what followed don’t happen anymore.

We should use these times to mourn the dead. We should not have to fear for the living.

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