In Full Color:
The Human Complexity of Muslim Life, Twenty-Five Years After 9/11
by Zack Manning
September 14, 2026
I. A Quarter Century of the Same Silhouette
Twenty-five years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, American public opinion of Muslims has not softened with time. It has hardened. A Pew Research Center survey conducted this spring found that 43% of U.S. adults say Muslims are less patriotic than other Americans, and 42% say Muslim Americans are having a negative impact on the country. More striking still, the share of Americans who say Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence — 25% just six months after the attacks in 2002 — has never since dropped below 38%, and has hovered between 45% and 52% for the past decade. In January of this year, 51% of U.S. adults held that view: a quarter century of distance from the attacks themselves, and a higher share of Americans believe Islam is uniquely prone to violence than did in the immediate aftermath. The gap has also become sharply partisan — 76% of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents now hold that view, compared with 29% of Democrats and Democratic leaners, a chasm that barely existed in 2002.
These are not the numbers of a society whose understanding of Muslims has matured with a quarter century of contact, immigration, and increased cultural presence. And the contact has been real, and it has been everywhere. Arab coffee shops have proliferated from Dearborn to Brooklyn to suburban strip malls that ten years ago held none. Nearly every American city and midsize town now has an Arab grocery store and restaurant that would have been unimaginable there a generation ago. Walk through any engineering department at any American university and Arab and Muslim students are not a curiosity but a substantial and unremarkable presence. Elyanna has performed to enormous crowds at Coachella, singing in Arabic. Ons Jabeur came within a set of winning a Grand Slam final, twice. Mohammed "Mo" Amer sells out comedy venues across the country and around the world and has built multiple hit series for Netflix out of his own Palestinian-Muslim-American story. None of this contact, none of this visibility, has moved the Pew numbers in the direction contact is supposed to move them.
This essay is about the mechanism behind that stubbornness — not simply that Americans, and institutions well beyond America, hold negative or flattened views of Muslims, but how those views are built, and why twenty-five years of visible, growing, unmistakable proximity has done so little to dislodge them. The argument is that we do not, in any real sense, see Muslims — not fully, not as the varied, contradictory, richly differentiated population any billion-person religious tradition necessarily contains. We do something narrower and easier: we caricature, reducing an entire civilization's worth of lived religious experience to a handful of recognizable postures, and we itemize, sorting individuals into a simple checklist of visible markers and mistaking the checklist for the person. Both moves accomplish the same thing: they let us stop looking, no matter how much more there now is to see.
II. A Mosaic Mistaken for a Monolith
Before turning to the mechanisms of that failure, it's worth stating plainly what gets erased by it, because the erasure begins with something as basic as race and ethnicity, and it goes back far longer than most Americans assume. American popular imagination tends to picture "Muslim" as a single ethnic silhouette — usually Arab — when the lived reality is nothing of the kind, and never has been. Historians estimate that somewhere between roughly 15 and 30 percent of the enslaved Africans brought to what became the United States were Muslim, some estimates running higher still — literate in Arabic, versed in the Quran, carrying with them centuries of West African Islamic scholarship. Slaveholders worked deliberately to strip this identity away, yet fragments of it survived and wove themselves into the devotional life that followed: the call-and-response, the rhythmic intensity, and elements of the vocal tradition that would later shape Black spiritual practice and the Southern Baptist church tradition carry traces of that suppressed Islamic inheritance, even where the connection has gone unacknowledged for generations. Composer Rhiannon Giddens's opera Omar, telling the story of the enslaved Muslim scholar Omar ibn Said, has done more than most contemporary works to put that erased history back in front of American audiences.
That history is the deep root of a diversity the present only continues. Black Americans make up a substantial share of the U.S. Muslim population today, many descended from this same suppressed inheritance and from the twentieth-century movements that later revived and reshaped it, entirely apart from the post-1965 wave of Muslim immigration. South Asian, Arab, Southeast Asian, sub-Saharan African, Turkic, Balkan, Persian, and white or Latino converts all populate American mosques alongside one another, often within the same congregation, frequently with little in common culturally beyond the fact of shared faith. Globally, the picture is even more obviously varied: the country with the largest Muslim population is Indonesia, not any Arab state, and the majority of the world's Muslims live in South and Southeast Asia, not the Middle East at all.
This is not a trivial footnote. It means that "Muslim" was never a racial or ethnic category to begin with, even though the caricature routinely treats it as one — collapsing race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion into a single suspect silhouette. A framework capable of taking Muslim identity seriously has to hold race and ethnicity as one axis of variation and religious practice as an entirely separate one, cutting across it in every direction. Two of the arguments taken up later in this essay are principally about the range of religious practice and belief within Islam — but that range sits on top of, and interacts with, this prior and equally significant range of who Muslims actually are, demographically and culturally, a fact American public discourse routinely erases before the more subtle erasures even begin.
III. Two Ways of Refusing to Look: The Caricature and the Checklist
It is worth separating two distinct failures of vision that operate together, because they are not quite the same error.
The caricature is the failure most visible in the Pew data: a flattened, often menacing image of "the Muslim" substituted for the reality of over a billion people. It is built from a small set of recurring figures — the terrorist, the veiled and silent woman, the foreign threat to a "civilizational" way of life — and it survives because it is emotionally load-bearing. It gives shape to fear, and fear, once given a face, is hard to dislodge with data. This is the caricature that produced 481 reported anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2001, up from 28 the year before, and that has never since returned to pre-9/11 levels even in its quietest years. It is also the caricature now finding new political voice: a sitting member of Congress posting "No more Muslims..." on social media this spring, another declaring that every Muslim in American public office is a "trojan horse" and a threat to the republic — rhetoric that has shifted, as observers of the discourse have noted, from framing Muslims as a terror threat to framing them as a civilizational one.
The checklist is quieter and, in some ways, more pervasive, because it doesn't require animus at all. It is the instinct — found in well-meaning institutions as often as hostile ones — to render a person's Muslim identity legible by checking it against a short list of visible markers: does she wear hijab, does he pray five times daily, do they eat halal, does the household drink alcohol. The checklist substitutes for the person. A high score reads as "devout" and "more Muslim"; a low score reads as "secular" or "assimilated." Almost no one asks whether the checklist was ever the right instrument for measuring what it claims to measure. The checklist feels neutral, even respectful, in a way the caricature does not. But it performs the same essential function: it lets the observer stop looking, confident that the checklist has already told them what they need to know.
Both failures converge on the same outcome across every sector of public and private life. Governments write threat assessments, country-conditions reports, and make immigration decisions that treat devotional intensity as a predictive variable, as though piety itself explains political behavior. Humanitarian and development organizations design needs assessments around "the Muslim community" as a single stakeholder with a uniform set of preferences. Universities file an enormously varied Muslim student body into a single affinity category. Businesses read halal certification as a stable predictor of broader consumer piety. Media coverage narrates any Muslim public figure as either reassuringly "moderate" or suspiciously "conservative." None of these institutions coordinate with one another, which is itself the clue that the error runs deeper than any one sector's expertise: they are all drawing on the same shallow, unexamined well.
IV. Said's Ghost: Orientalism at Nearly Fifty
None of this is new, and it helps to know how old it is. In 1978, Edward Said published Orientalism, arguing that the West's centuries-long project of representing "the Orient" — and Islam in particular — was never a neutral act of description. It was a system of representation that constructed the "Oriental" as fundamentally other: static where the West was dynamic, irrational where the West was rational, despotic where the West was free, and — crucially for Said's argument — always already known in advance, categorized and explained before any actual encounter with an actual Muslim or Arab person took place. Said's insight was that this body of representation functioned less as knowledge about a real place and people than as an institutional apparatus — built through scholarship, literature, colonial administration, and eventually media — that produced the Orient it claimed merely to describe, in service of Western power over the region.
The caricature described above is Said's Orientalism continuing to do its work, largely unbothered by the passage of nearly half a century since he published it. The terrorist, the oppressed veiled woman, the civilizational threat — these are not new figures invented after 2001; they are the same recurring cast Said identified in nineteenth-century Orientalist scholarship and colonial-era travel writing, updated for cable news and the congressional floor. What 9/11 did was not invent the caricature. It supplied it with a devastatingly effective occasion, and then a permanent anchor: a single day of real horror made to stand in, indefinitely, for an entire religious tradition's presumed character.
V. The Long Arc of Suspicion: Rozina Ali's Seasons of Fury
Said's framework was built around the external, largely foreign gaze of empire and Orientalist scholarship. It takes a different kind of book to show how the same logic became embedded in American domestic policy specifically, over a much longer stretch of time than most people assume. Journalist Rozina Ali's newly published Seasons of Fury (2026) does exactly that. Ali's history traces the surveillance of Arab activists back to the 1960s, well before 9/11 gave the caricature its most durable modern occasion, and follows it forward through laws in the 1990s that broadened the legal definition of terrorism, into the mass detention and surveillance of entire Muslim communities in the 2000s, and finally to the rise of a cottage industry of think tanks and advocacy groups whose business model has been sowing panic about Islam itself. Telling this history through four families across eight decades, Ali makes the case that American fear of Muslims was never simply a spontaneous reaction to a single Tuesday morning in 2001 — it was the acceleration of conflicts between American law enforcement and Muslim communities that were already decades old, frequently entangled with the politics of the Israel-Palestine conflict, which has long supplied the caricature with an additional, specifically political charge beyond religious difference alone.
What Ali's book contributes to this essay's argument is a bridge between Said's diagnosis of representation and the present-day institutional failures described above: the caricature was not simply believed by ordinary Americans absorbing bad media coverage. It was built, deliberately and over decades, into statute, surveillance architecture, and government practice, by an apparatus with its own institutional momentum — which is exactly why twenty-five years of contrary evidence has done so little to dislodge it. An apparatus built into law and bureaucratic practice does not update itself simply because the population it was built to watch has grown larger, more visible, and more woven into ordinary American life.
VI. An Enemy Killing Within
There is a further, harder truth embedded in the last twenty-five years that the caricature depends on obscuring: the "war on terror," launched in the name of defeating a coherent civilizational enemy, was substantially a war against organizations that have killed vastly more Muslims than anyone else. A 2009 study by the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point found that al-Qaeda killed roughly seven to eight times more Muslims than non-Muslims in its attacks. Broader data compiled from the Global Terrorism Database tells the same story at larger scale: well over 90% of fatalities from Islamist terrorist violence over the past two decades have occurred in Muslim-majority countries, with Muslims constituting the overwhelming majority of the victims — a pattern researchers at the University of Maryland's START center have described as leaving Muslims "absolutely" the population most victimized by this violence worldwide. Al-Shabaab's bombings in Somali markets, ISIS's massacres of Iraqi and Syrian civilians, Boko Haram's abductions in Nigeria — these were not, in the main, attacks by an "external" enemy against foreign civilizations. They were, overwhelmingly, violence perpetrated within Muslim societies, against Muslim people, by organizations claiming to act in Islam's name while inflicting the vast majority of their carnage on the very communities they claimed to represent.
This fact sits uneasily with the framing that has organized twenty-five years of American policy, because a war conceived around a clash of civilizations requires an external enemy, and the data simply does not support that there was ever a coherent, external, civilizational enemy in the first place — only a set of violent organizations whose primary victims were the people the American caricature imagined as the threat's natural constituency. The war on terror was substantially waged against groups that were already at war with the people they were purportedly recruited from, a fact the caricature has never had much use for, because it complicates the simple story considerably.
American society already possesses, closer to home, the conceptual tools needed to make this distinction correctly, if it chose to apply them consistently. No serious commentator holds the Southern Baptist Convention, or Christianity itself, responsible for the Ku Klux Klan, or asks white Christian Americans to answer collectively for the resurgence of white nationalist violence that federal law enforcement has repeatedly identified as among the most lethal domestic terrorism threats the country faces today. The Klan murdered thousands of Americans, many of them Christian themselves, over the better part of a century, frequently invoking a distorted Christian nationalism to justify it — and no one seriously argues that this history indicts Christianity, or that individual white churchgoers carry some diffuse burden of suspicion because of it. The distinction drawn correctly in that case — between a faith tradition and a set of extremists who invoke its name while betraying its adherents in practice — is exactly the distinction the caricature refuses to extend to Islam, to al-Qaeda, to ISIS, or to al-Shabaab. Every society produces its own violent fringe, and every society has to decide whether it holds the fringe responsible or the tradition the fringe claims. A standard applied consistently would treat both cases the same way. Applied to only one of them, it was never really about the evidence in the first place.
That complication has been extraordinarily expensive. According to the Costs of War project at Brown University, the most comprehensive independent accounting available, total U.S. spending on the post-9/11 wars exceeds $8 trillion through 2023, with the full twenty-five-year total, including future veterans' care and interest on war debt, likely to approach or exceed $10 trillion — a sum in the range of the annual GDP of Japan and Germany combined, financed substantially through borrowing whose interest payments will continue accruing for decades. That spending built and sustained a global military and surveillance apparatus of extraordinary scale, deployed against an enemy that the underlying data suggests was never quite what the war's own framing assumed it to be.
The deeper missed opportunity is not simply the dollar figure, though the dollar figure is staggering. It is what the same resources, redirected, might have accomplished. The United States possesses, in its universities, its scholarly institutions, and its capacity for cultural and linguistic engagement embodied most acutely in generations of immigrants, an intellectual wellspring that could have been mobilized against extremist ideology itself — a concerted, well-funded, decades-long national effort to understand, engage, and out-argue the ideas that actually motivate recruitment into groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS, rather than treating the problem as one to be solved primarily by force. No army has ever defeated an idea by killing enough of its adherents; ideas are defeated by better ideas, propagated with comparable seriousness and resources. Twenty-five years of overwhelming military investment, set against a comparatively token investment in the intellectual and cultural expertise that might have actually undercut extremist recruitment at its source, represents a genuine and largely unexamined failure of strategic imagination — one this essay's central argument suggests was itself downstream of the caricature: it is far easier to fund an army against an enemy you have already flattened into a single threatening silhouette than to fund the patient, complicated work of understanding a billion-person civilization well enough to know where its actual vulnerabilities to extremism lie, and where they do not.
VII. Rumsfeld's Cubicle Twin
It would be a mistake to let this argument settle into a familiar partisan shape, because the failure of understanding runs through every political disposition, not merely the ones most associated with open hostility. Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush, in the years after 2001, presided over and helped popularize a version of the caricature dressed in the language of civilizational conflict — the framing critiqued above. That much is not controversial.
But the aid worker sitting in a cubicle in Washington or Geneva, a Black Lives Matter poster on the wall behind her, managing a five-million-dollar nutrition program in Yemen, has too often operated from the same underlying deficit of understanding, simply dressed in different politics. She may reject every word Rumsfeld ever said about Islam, and mean it sincerely. But if her program's needs assessment treats Yemeni Muslim communities as a uniform bloc with a single set of preferences around gender, authority, and outside assistance — if it never asks which register of Islamic practice, or which zone of custom and discretion, actually governs the specific community she is trying to serve — her "good politics" do not translate into good knowledge. The consequences of that gap are just as real as the consequences of Rumsfeld's caricature, even though they arrive without any of Rumsfeld's malice: a nutrition program that misjudges who controls household food decisions, or which community structures actually carry legitimacy, delivers worse outcomes regardless of the good intentions and correct politics of the person who designed it.
This is the essay's most uncomfortable claim, and it is made deliberately: caricature and checklist are not opposites occupying opposite ends of the political spectrum. They are the same underlying failure — a refusal, or an inability, to do the harder work of actually seeing Muslim complexity — expressing itself in two different registers, one hostile and one well-meaning, both producing dire consequences for the people on the other end of the policy or the program. Being on the correct side of the caricature politically has never been sufficient protection against committing the itemization instead.
VIII. The Case for Contradiction
Shahab Ahmed's What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (2016) is, at its foundation, an argument that the checklist described above rests on a category error nearly a century in the making within Islamic studies itself, not only in Western popular perception. Ahmed calls it the "legal-supremacist paradigm" — the assumption, held by many Orientalist scholars and many Muslims alike, that Islam simply is Islamic law, so that a person's Muslim-ness can be measured by their conformity to it. Devout means legally compliant; secular or lapsed means legally lax. This is precisely the logic of the checklist: prayer frequency, dress, dietary observance, all functioning as proxies for an underlying, singular variable called "how Muslim."
Ahmed's alternative rests on three terms describing what he means by engagement with Revelation: Text, Revelation as scripture, the Quran itself; Pre-Text, the transcendent, unseen domain Revelation descends from, accessible through reason as much as through scripture — which is why philosophy and rational inquiry were, for Ahmed, never merely activities Muslims happened to practice alongside their religion, but genuinely Islamic modes of reaching the same reality Revelation points toward; and Con-Text, the vast accumulated field of meaning that centuries of Muslims produced while engaging Revelation — poetry, visual art, music, wine culture, Sufi metaphysics — material carrying no direct scriptural mandate, yet historically understood by the people who produced and lived it as already, fully continuous with being Islamic.
Being Muslim, on this account, is the hermeneutical engagement with all three dimensions simultaneously — and because Text, Pre-Text, and Con-Text do not always point in the same direction, contradiction is not a deviation from this picture of Islam. It is the ordinary condition of it. A person legally observant in one register and exploratory, even transgressive, in another is not living in hypocrisy or confusion; both postures can be fully, simultaneously Islamic, because they answer to different dimensions of the same Revelation. Ahmed illustrates this with a deliberately non-legal archive: the wine poetry of Hafiz, soaked in imagery of intoxication and love that sits in open tension with legal prohibition, yet historically read as a vehicle for genuine spiritual truth; the philosophical tradition of thinkers like Ibn Sina, whose claim that reason alone could reach ultimate truth drew condemnation from some jurists while remaining central to what educated Muslims across centuries understood their own tradition to include; and the sprawling Persianate world Ahmed calls the "Balkans-to-Bengal complex," where figural art, music, and wine culture were not underground deviations from a purer legal Islam practiced elsewhere, but ordinary elite and popular religious life across a vast geography for half a millennium.
Applied back to the checklist, Ahmed's diagnosis is direct: the checklist an institution reaches for was never what made someone Islamic in the first place, and its absence in any one register says nothing reliable about the presence or depth of Islam in another. The checklist has no way to register a person formed by devotional poetry rather than daily ritual as anything but insufficiently religious — which is exactly the checklist's failure, made visible.
IX. Space that Law Never Claims
If Ahmed explains why the checklist misreads contradiction as insincerity, Sherman Jackson's The Islamic Secular (2024) explains the checklist's mirror-image error: why it misreads discretion as irreligion. Jackson writes from a different position than Ahmed — from inside the Islamic legal tradition itself, rather than against its overreach — and his conclusion is, in its way, more surprising precisely because of where it comes from.
Jackson's central distinction is between shari'ah's jurisdiction and Islam's jurisdiction. Classical jurists, on his reading, understood shari'ah's reach to be deliberately limited: enormous stretches of ordinary human life fell outside what religious law was designed or intended to regulate. But Islam's jurisdiction as religion was never similarly bounded. Everything remains within the purview of God's gaze, whether or not it falls within a specific legal ruling. What results is a third space Jackson calls the Islamic Secular — territory differentiated from religious law without being differentiated from religion itself, still governed by moral seriousness and standing under divine accountability, simply not dictated by a specific rule, because none was ever meant to reach that far.
This is a deliberate departure from the Western concept of the secular, and Jackson insists on the distinction. Western secularism liberates entire domains of life from religion altogether. The Islamic Secular differentiates space from shari'ah specifically, not from religion as such — a "religious secular," in his phrase, a complement to religious life rather than an exit from it. A Muslim exercising discretion in this space has not stepped outside Islam. She remains answerable to God for how she exercises that discretion, even though no specific ruling tells her how, because the domain was never shari'ah's to claim in the first place.
Applied back to the checklist, Jackson's corrective is precise: an institution that reads a Muslim's non-legal choices as evidence of diminished religiosity is mistaking Islamic Secular space for irreligion. It is not. It is still religious life, still under moral seriousness, simply not law-governed, and treating it as a data point in a piety scorecard misreads the tradition on its own terms.
Together, Ahmed and Jackson close off the checklist from two directions at once. Ahmed shows that inconsistency and contradiction are not evidence of a diluted or confused faith. Jackson shows that the absence of a legal marker is not evidence of an absent religiosity either. Between them, the checklist loses its footing entirely.
X. Four Lenses and One Blind Spot
It is worth drawing the four threads together, because the relationship between them is not simply additive — it marks an actual progression in where the problem is located. Said diagnosed a Western apparatus of representation that constructed Islam and the Muslim world as a fixed, knowable, inferior other, built and sustained from outside. Ali showed how that same apparatus took specific, durable institutional form inside American law enforcement and policy over decades, well before and long after 2001. Both are accounts of the caricature — how it was built, and by whom.
Ahmed and Jackson extend the project into territory neither Said nor Ali fully reaches, because their target is not the external, hostile gaze or its institutional embodiment, but the internal architecture of the thing being looked at. Even an observer who has fully absorbed Said's lesson, and who knows Ali's history of surveillance and suspicion by heart, can still get it wrong through the checklist rather than the caricature — because rejecting the hostile gaze does not automatically supply the right categories for what a more sympathetic gaze should actually be looking for. A humanitarian aid worker on the frontlines in the Middle East will almost certainly accepts Said's diagnosis of Orientalism. She may instictively acknowledge the anthropological conflict raised in Ali's book too. Neither one, on its own, tells her that her needs assessment's checklist is also broken.
There is, encouragingly, real evidence that genuine sight — not the caricature, not the checklist, but actual sustained human contact with a specific, visible Muslim person — can move the numbers the Pew survey cannot. A study from Stanford University's Immigration Policy Lab, examining police hate-crime data and fifteen million tweets from British soccer fans, found that after the visibly, openly observant Muslim footballer Mohamed Salah joined Liverpool F.C. in 2017, hate crimes in the Liverpool area fell by roughly 16 to 19 percent relative to what would otherwise have been expected, while anti-Muslim tweets among Liverpool's own fans fell by roughly half compared to fans of other English clubs. The researchers' own explanation is instructive: watching Salah pray in celebration after scoring gave fans ordinary, repeated, humanizing exposure to Islamic practice that displaced the caricature with an actual person. That is precisely what Ahmed and Jackson supply in a different register — not a viral moment of contact, but a historically grounded account of the internal complexity itself, sufficiently detailed that a good-faith observer finally has something more accurate to look for, or, better, has been given reason to stop looking for a checklist at all.
XI. What It Would Take to Actually See
Twenty-five years is long enough to ask what it would actually take to close the gap between the reality — a growing, increasingly visible, racially and ethnically diverse, extraordinarily varied Muslim American population and a Muslim world of comparable variety — and the caricature and checklist that have proven so resistant to that reality's plain evidence.
Government policy, from country-conditions reporting to domestic threat assessment to the strategic posture of counterterrorism itself, would be measurably better informed by treating devotional intensity as exactly what Ahmed and Jackson show it to be: not a stable predictor of anything, and by recognizing, as the data on intra-Muslim terrorist violence makes plain, that the last twenty-five years of military strategy were substantially built around a misapprehension of who the enemy actually was and who it was actually killing. A nuanced approach does not mean a softer one. It means a more accurate one, and it may well mean a cheaper one — a fraction of $8 trillion in military spending, redirected toward the intellectual and linguistic expertise capable of actually understanding and countering extremist ideology, could plausibly have accomplished more than the military campaigns themselves did.
Civic organizations would perform their own missions more effectively by building programming and outreach around the actual range of Muslim identity — racial, ethnic, and religious — in their communities, rather than a single imagined constituency.
Humanitarian organizations, for all their expertise in logistics, medicine, and crisis response, still frequently lack the specific cultural expertise required to deliver the highest-quality assistance in Muslim-majority contexts, precisely because their needs assessments, country directors, program officers, and "cultural experts" are too often built on an itemized, monolithic portrait rather than the full human complexity Ahmed's Con-Text and Jackson's Islamic Secular both describe. Good politics, as the aid worker's example shows, is not a substitute for this expertise.
Individuals — in dinner conversations, in newsrooms, in classrooms, in casual judgment of a neighbor or coworker — bear a version of this same responsibility, scaled down but not diminished. Recognizing the vast complexity of what it means to be Muslim, racially, ethnically, and religiously, and resisting both the caricature and the checklist in equally ordinary encounters, is not a technical skill reserved for policy analysts. It is a basic form of attention that any of us can extend or withhold — the same form of attention that, multiplied by fifteen million tweets and a few seasons of football, was enough to bend Liverpool's numbers in the right direction.
XII. A Debt Twenty-Five Years Overdue
None of this requires every general, aid worker, professor, or neighbor to earn a doctorate in Islamic intellectual history. It requires the much smaller, much harder recognition that this essay's four sources converge on from entirely different directions, twenty-five years after a single day reshaped how an entire country, and the world more broadly, looks at over a billion people: that Islam was never a scorecard, that its adherents were never simply devout or secular, contradictory or consistent, legible or suspicious, and that neither was the enemy the war on terror imagined it was fighting. A society's failure to notice any of this, sustained now for a quarter century and counting, at a cost measured in trillions of dollars and in the daily dignity of millions of American Muslims, and Muslims all over the world, is not a small technical gap in an otherwise adequate picture. It is the picture's fundamental flaw, and it has a human cost attached to every year it goes uncorrected. We are all paying the price.
A Note on Remembrance
This essay has argued about policy, perception, and a quarter century of misunderstanding. It should not close without saying plainly what sits underneath all of it.
Nearly three thousand people were murdered on the morning of September 11, 2001, and the toll did not end when the towers fell. It extended through years of illness among first responders and lower Manhattan residents, through the grief of children who grew up without a parent, through a still-lengthening list of names read aloud every September. Those victims, and the families who carry them, deserve to be remembered not as the premise of an argument but as who they were before that morning: parents, cooks, firefighters, traders, janitors, immigrants themselves in no small number, ordinary people going to work.
The twenty-five years since have produced their own vast and still-unfinished ledger. The men, women, and children killed in the wars, strikes, and interventions the attacks set in motion. The American service members who did not come home, and those who came home changed. And the far larger number of people, overwhelmingly Muslim, who had no hand in what was done in their name, and who bore the heaviest share of its consequences.
Every one of these lives, whichever “ledger” it falls on, deserves to be remembered for how it was lived rather than only for how it ended. That is not a postscript to this essay's argument. It is the reason for making it. Seeing people in full is what we owe the ones we have lost, and it is the only way to stop adding to the count.
A Note on Sources
This essay draws on a handful of works and studies, briefly described here for readers who want to follow up on any of them.
The Pew Research Center report, 25 Years After 9/11: A Portrait of Muslim Americans (published September 2026), supplies the essay's opening statistics on American attitudes toward Muslims and Islam, tracked from 2001 through 2026, along with data on discrimination reported by Muslim Americans themselves and the growth of the Muslim American population and its civic presence.
Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) is the foundational critique of how Western scholarship, literature, and political discourse historically constructed "the Orient," and Islam specifically, as a fixed, inferior, and always-already-understood other — a framework this essay treats as the intellectual ancestor of today's caricature.
Rozina Ali's Seasons of Fury (2026) is a recently published narrative history tracing the surveillance of, and legal hostility toward, Muslim and Arab communities in the United States from the 1960s through the post-9/11 era, told through four families across eight decades.
Shahab Ahmed's What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (2016) is a work of intellectual and cultural history arguing against reducing Islam to legal conformity, and for a broader conception built around the categories of Text, Pre-Text, and Con-Text.
Sherman Jackson's The Islamic Secular (2024) is a work of Islamic legal theory arguing that classical jurists always understood shari'ah's jurisdiction to be more limited than Islam's jurisdiction as a religion, leaving a legitimate, non-legally-governed space — the "Islamic Secular" — that remains fully religious.
The Stanford University Immigration Policy Lab study, "Can Exposure to Celebrities Reduce Prejudice? The Effect of Mohamed Salah on Islamophobic Behaviors and Attitudes" (published in the American Political Science Review), analyzed hate-crime reports and millions of social media posts to measure the effect of footballer Mohamed Salah's visible Muslim identity on prejudice in Liverpool after he joined the club in 2017.