How life changed for Muslim Americans after 9/11

0:00We're following the September 11th attacks. So, US President George W. Bush launched his war on terror, which led to the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. This marked a new chapter for Muslim-Australian, of Muslim Americans, who found themselves often the subject of suspicion and even blame for the actions of the terrorists. Mustafa Bayumi is a professor at Brooklyn College at City University of New York, and his author of, how does it feel to be a problem being young in Arab and America, and also this Muslim life dispatches from the war on terror? Mustafa, you were in Manhattan on September 11th. When did you first understand that something had happened? Oh, it was early in the morning watching the news getting ready to begin my day. And initially, I like, I think, most other New Yorkers didn't know what was happening and thought maybe it was just, you know, a hobby plane or something that had crashed into

1:03the Twin Towers. But pretty soon it became evident that this was a world historical event. When it became clear that the hijackers were members of Al Qaeda, can you remember how you felt and how you were reflecting on being a Muslim-American at that time as to what may come? Yeah, I mean, that too happened, I would say, you know, within hours of the attack, if not days. I recall the city being in a great deal of mourning, including myself and a lot of other Muslim Americans that I knew. But at the same time, we, Muslim Americans also were beginning to have a great fear for ourselves. There was a lot of stories that began circulating amongst us that were about vigilante violence. Didn't take very long for me to know that every Arab or Muslim that I knew in the city had

2:03either been visited by the FBI or knew someone who had been visited by the FBI. So that level of deep concern and, if not fear, happened very quickly. What did that mean for you? You know, it meant thinking very clearly about what my days were going to be like. It meant checking in with a lot of friends routinely. It meant knowing that I was identifiable. I remember going to a rally shortly after 9-11 with some friends, non-Muslim friends. And there was a Chilean news broadcast team there and they immediately found me instead of asking me what it was like to be a Muslim. I thought, oh my gosh, this is surprising. How do they know that I'm Muslim just by my appearance was actually quite troubling to me. So yeah, there was a lot of that that was happening around that time. A lot of women that I knew, Muslim women who were wearing hijabs, thought very clearly

3:08about whether they should take them off at that moment. There were some friends of mine who were non-Muslim also offered to accompany people who were feeling too afraid to go shopping that they could do that. That sort of thing. Because I should also say at the same time though, there was a great deal of support coming from broader New York City community. I mean, New York City was then and still is today a generally progressive, very welcoming, overall welcoming environment. How do you see life for Muslims in the United States now? We've seen, Islamophobia has continued, but also we've seen the rise politically of a number of Muslim figures, including the mayor of New York. How do you view all of that? I think that in the first wave, after 9-11 for the first five, six, eight years, there

4:10was a lot of sense of we were responding to crises within the Muslim-American community. And then there became a moment when I think within the Muslim-American community, a sense that we had to organize ourselves instead and have more long-term durable solutions. And so there became a really concerted effort to try to mobilize and to organize, especially through political power precisely because there was a kind of overall sense of repression coming from the government. And those gains have achieved remarkable success. And I see the rise of someone like Zohran Nandani as being part of that. And he, in fact, was part of the Muslim Democratic Club, which is one of those organizations before he was mayor of New York. But with that success, I think, I actually think some of the rise of this noxious, notchist and Islamophobia that we see today, some of it's attributable to the success of Muslims in the public sphere today. It's almost a dialectical relationship.

5:12The more successful Muslims become within the United States, the more opposition they will get from loudmouth, right-wing populists. And I think we're seeing some of that today too. What do you think of that? Oh, I think it's horrible. I think it's outside of the realm of what decent, you know, sensible people should subscribe to. And I think that it's also part of the contemporary Republican playbook. The Republican playbook in the United States has veered terribly far to the right, engages in openly racist discourse, not just against Muslims also against Latinos, against black people, against trans people, you know, all of this sort of stuff. I think it's divisive. I think it is corrosive to building the kind of nation that we need. So, for thank you very much for giving some of your reflections on September 11 and its consequences. Thank you. No, of course.

6:12Mark Tlajir.