9/11 entrenched Islamophobia in US politics. But it doesn’t work the way you think

On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, I offer some thoughts about the presence and function of Islamophobia in American politics in The Guardian.

It’s been 25 years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, and during this time Muslim Americans have learned how to live in that dangerous space between other Americans’ fears and their ignorance.

The fear was clear from the beginning. Immediately following 9/11, Muslim Americans faced what Human Rights Watch called “a severe wave of backlash violence”. A tide of hate rose up against ordinary Muslims and those who appeared to be Muslim, including at least three murders in the immediate backlash after the attacks. The federal government, for its part, began targeting Muslim immigrants in a massive surge of repression that legal experts soon compared to the Palmer Raids of the 1920s.

The ignorance was just as evident. Even Oprah Winfrey did her part to allay it, dedicating an episode of her show in October 2001 to “Islam 101”. The Qur’an leapt on to the New York Times bestseller list that fall. Yet despite these early efforts at education, most Americans still learned little about Islam and Muslims. One 2006 study found that only a third of those polled realized that Muslims worship the same God as Christians and Jews do. Close to 10% of respondents thought Muslims worship a “moon god”.

Much of this fear and ignorance has continued unevenly over the last quarter century, with negative attitudes towards Muslim Americans softening at times and hardening, sometimes into deadly violence, at other times. What’s interesting is when expressions of these attitudes happen. It turns out that predicting when animosity to Muslims will rise and fall may not be quite what you think.

Researchers who study Islamophobia discovered several years ago that anti-Muslim outbreaks in the United States don’t follow highly publicized acts of terrorism. Rather, Islamophobic incidents tend to cluster more routinely around our election cycles. That’s what the New American Foundation found in 2018. That’s what the researcher Dalia Mogahed discovered earlier. And that’s partly what the Brookings Institution’s Shibley Telhami was referencing when he wrote, in 2024, that there was “strong suggestive evidence” that presidential messaging and crisis rhetoric can considerably sway American public attitudes toward Muslims.

Islamophobia, in other words, is better understood not as an irrational fear of a religious other but rather as an increasingly instrumentalized part of our politics, one that is most often activated around our elections. (Needless to say, when Islamophobia is deployed, it’s at the expense of the American Muslim community’s wellbeing.) And since we’re also closing in on a fiercely contested midterm election season, we should take note of the sky-high levels of Islamophobic rhetoric we’re witnessing today from the (mostly Republican) politician class.

Consider Laura Loomer, the far-right activist and Donald Trump’s close confidante. “Ban Muslims from holding office in America,” she posted on Twitter/X in July. Then there’s the South Carolina representative Nancy Mace, who wrote: “Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic. We refuse to be silent.” The Florida representative Randy Fine, who has called for the deportation of the New York City mayor, Zohran Mamdani, believes: “We need more Islamophobia, not less. Fear of Islam is rational.” And the senator Tommy Tuberville recently stated: “Michigan Democrats just voted to send a TERRORIST to the Senate. Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed is a RADICAL ISLAMIST who will do everything he can to destroy America.” In a thinly veiled Islamophobic comment, JD Vance recently said: “There’s something about Abdul El-Sayed that is very, very evil. And on the rise in the United States of America today.”

In Texas, the levels of Islamophobia are now stratospheric. Lone Star politicians loudly trumpet anti-Muslim messages and repeatedly introduce versions of anti-Muslim legislation, seeking to forbid everything from sharia courts, which don’t actually exist in Texas, to real estate developments by Muslims. Must be election season…

Read the rest here.