Muslim Women Have Spent 25 Years Navigating the Effects of 9/11 — And a Growing Perception That Their Faith and Visibility Pose a Cultural Threat.
Twenty-five years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, many Muslim Americans are still perceived in ways shaped by 9/11 and continue to face discrimination, bigotry and suspicion. Muslim women, many of whom wear a visible identifier of their faith, often find themselves targets for what they represent, both past and present.
“It’s very clear from the data and interviews with Muslims that the terrorist attacks fundamentally changed the trajectory of the Muslim American community in some pretty big ways,” said Besheer Mohamed, a senior researcher at Pew Research Center with extensive experience studying Muslim American communities.
But in data collected in the spring of 2026, Pew found that women were more likely than men to say they had experienced discrimination in the past year. Respondents said they had been treated with suspicion, been singled out at airport security or by other law enforcement, called offensive names or physically attacked, Mohamed said.
Views on Islam are more negative now than they were in 2002, according to Pew data. The 19th spoke to experts about the long impact of 9/11 and the growth of the Muslim American community as Islamophobic rhetoric intensifies in politics.
The Hijab Seen as a Threat and a Target
Sahar Aziz remembers exactly where she was when the attacks happened: She was a first-year law student at the University of Texas. Like millions of other Americans, she followed the news that day, when nearly 3,000 people were killed in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania after 19 Islamic extremists hijacked four commercial airplanes in a coordinated attack.
For the next several years, Aziz said, she and other Muslim colleagues were called “terrorist lawyers,” and she felt like public enemy number one as the United States launched the global war on terror and created the Transportation Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security.
Now, Aziz is a law professor at Rutgers Law School in New Jersey who often writes about the ways in which Muslim American women are caught in an intersection of biases. According to Pew, nearly half of Muslim women said that on any given day there was something distinctive about their appearance, voice or clothing that could be associated with being Muslim. Of these women, the vast majority said they wore a hijab, a traditional headscarf used as an expression of modesty.
The attacks on September 11 “triggered wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the rise of ISIS — and at these points, the hijab was certainly associated with terrorism,” Aziz said. “These women were seen as sympathizing with terrorism at the very least, and at the very worst being co-conspirators.”
But now, Aziz said the hijab has transformed into something else: a cultural threat.
“There is a social contract that nearly every immigrant, especially from outside Europe, has had to adhere to upon moving here,” Aziz said. “It’s the contract of assimilation into Anglo-Saxon Protestant European norms and religion, and that entails changing how you dress, how you talk, how you live — to not be seen as threatening.”
In 2026, Pew surveyed Americans on their views of Muslim Americans, and 42 percent said Muslim Americans have a negative impact on the country. When asked to explain their reasoning, answers included: “Remember the twin towers?” and “Fear of another 9/11 terrorist attack.”
“It appears that 25 years of multiple generations being told repeatedly, either through visuals or through explicit rhetoric, that some Muslims are terrorists, are anti-American, are misogynistic — that triggered a hysteria rather than an embrace,” Aziz said.
About six months after the attacks, 25 percent of U.S. adults said the Islamic religion was more likely than other religions to encourage violence. In 11 subsequent polls, that figure never went lower than 38 percent. In the last decade, however, it rose to about 50 percent. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the country, reported a record-high number of discrimination complaints filed by Muslims in 2025.
“When you have racism against a particular group so deeply entrenched, the default position is guilt by association, presumption of guilt or collective guilt,” Aziz said. “Then individuals have to prove their innocence with their neighbors, their schools and communities.”
The 9/11 Generation
When the 9/11 attacks occurred, Jasmin Zine’s sons were still in school in Canada. She saw how immediately her sons had to begin navigating new stereotypes and misconceptions around terrorism, jihadism and violence. Her older son’s name, Osama, quickly became demonized due to its association with Osama bin Laden, the leader of the militant terrorist organization that orchestrated the attacks.
Zine, a sociology professor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, said her family’s experience prompted her to write a book, “Under Siege: Islamophobia and the 9/11 Generation.” She interviewed around 130 Muslim youth and people who worked with youth in the community, including religious leaders. She largely interviewed people between the ages of 18 and 25 who were in middle school at the time of the attacks.
“I was interested in examining the impact of the aftermath of 9/11, which was an escalation point for Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism,” Zine said. “I was especially interested in how it was impacting the millennial generation of Muslim youth who were growing up under the specter of this global war on terror.”
Overnight, these children went from unobtrusive citizens to being seen as potential threats. She asked them questions about their sense of identity and belonging, what it felt like to be targeted by security regimes and agencies, and if they were ever singled out for scrutiny on the basis of their religious identity.
“What I found is that 9/11 certainly disrupted a lot of their adolescence, and it’s also made them more self-surveilling,” Zine said. “They internalized the fact that they were being watched and that they were under suspicion.”
Most of the millennials she talked to did not explicitly say that 9/11 impacted them. But with follow-up questioning, it became clear that they were aware of the stereotypes that existed that cast Muslims as folk devils. Students from one Muslim student association told her they opted not to play paintball or certain video games in public spaces “just in case people thought they were violent or planning an attack.”
Millennial Muslim women told Zine that they were subject to more harassment when they wore headscarves. One hijab-wearing young woman told Zine that she didn’t feel like she could be in public while in a bad mood, because she felt a pressure to positively represent all Muslims.
“She had to bottle up her feelings to remain pleasant because she was visibly Muslim,” Zine said. “She didn’t have the luxury of being an individual.”
Solutions and Silver Linings
The Muslim American population has risen substantially in the past two-and-a-half decades. There are about 5.5 million Muslims now, compared with 2.4 million in 2007, the first year Pew estimated the size of the population. The number of mosques rose from 1,200 to 2,800 between 2000 and 2020, according to the Faith Communities Today project.
More than 20 years after she was called a “terrorist lawyer,” Aziz said it was “refreshing” to see growth in the National Association of Muslim Lawyers and the creation of the American Muslim Bar Association. She’s also noticed a rise of Muslim influencers, young musicians and artists. But Aziz said she wants to see more positive representation that humanizes Muslim Americans in mainstream culture, films and shows.
“We need to expose the American public to the diversity of Muslim experiences, the ordinariness of Muslim Americans,” Aziz said. “They are just like any other group of people who live in the United States. They are funny, sad, ambitious and normal.”
Aziz also said there should be an update in the education system to incorporate more modules and curricula depicting Muslim Americans outside of the national security lens.
“We’re talking about 1 to 2 percent of the population,” Aziz said. “It’s a very small number and is more likely to go unnoticed. And yet, they receive an outsized amount of negative attention by politicians.”
Views on Islam are more partisan than ever before, according to Pew. Republicans are more likely to say that Islam encourages violence, and GOP politicians continue to disseminate Islamophobic ads, rhetoric and policy. In March, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, co-founder of the Sharia-Free America Caucus, posted “No more Muslims” on social media. In August, Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina posted, “Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic.”
Since 2001, there has been a notable rise in Muslim American participation in politics, with Muslim candidates winning multiple primary contests. All of them — besides Dr. Mehmet Oz, who ran for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania in 2022 — have been Democrats. Voters in Michigan recently chose Dr. Abdul El-Sayed as their Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate. And in New York, Zohran Mamdani was inaugurated as the city’s first Muslim mayor early this year.
In 2001, there were no Muslim members of Congress. Now, there are five: André Carson, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Lateefah Simon and Aisha Wahab. Omar and Tlaib made history in 2019 as the first Muslim women sworn into the U.S. Congress. Their tenures have not been smooth – Omar in particular has faced challenges from both House colleagues and the White House — but they have continued to earn their constituents’ votes.
Aziz pointed to other civil rights movements, such as Black Lives Matter, that highlight how long-term progress is often met with short-term backlash. She is optimistic that progress will win out in the end as the Muslim population continues to grow.
“In many ways, this backlash against Muslims is itself an admission of progress,” Aziz said. “We’re at a shifting point where more Muslims have parents who were born and raised in America, and now they are beginning or on the verge of becoming leaders. They are going to expect equality in a much more meaningful way.”
This article was originally published by The 19th on September 10, 2026.
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