As the 25th anniversary of 9/11/2001 approaches, Islamophobia is rampant. This week in a convoluted rant against Islam, Rudy Giuliani said Mayor Mamdani should skip the memorial ceremony and a petition to bar Mamdani from attending reached 100,000 signatures.
In today’s newsletter we’re reflecting on how 9/11 shaped Islamophobia, but also Muslim political power in NYC. The Gothamist published an article on “How post-9/11 Islamophobia sparked a Muslim political awakening in NYC”. We’ve included the beginning here and encourage you to read the rest.
Just a few days after the 9/11 attacks, then-16-year-old Faiza Ali was wearing a hijab at a Rite Aid near her home in Midwood, Brooklyn, when a screaming woman told her to leave. The woman pushed Ali's little sister as other customers and a security guard stood by idly.
Ali Najmi remembers when his Pakistani immigrant mother stopped wearing her traditional shalwar kameez outside their home in Glen Oaks, Queens. She started covering the Quran she read on the subway with a paper bag.
And Ramzi Kassem, who volunteered as a legal translator at a nearby prison, remembers being briefly detained by a guard who suspected he might be a terrorism suspect.
Twenty-five years later, the three now hold key appointments in the administration of the city’s first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Their paths to the halls of power show that the wave of post-9/11 Islamophobia that cast Muslims as adversaries also sparked a political awakening among a generation that went on to help Mamdani get elected.
‘Islamophobia after 9/11 became a kind of institutionalized force, primarily through different forms of government repression,’ said Moustafa Bayoumi, a Brooklyn College professor who has written about Muslim political organizing in New York City. ‘The younger generation especially decided that they had to meet those challenges head-on, and they really began organizing collectively under the banner of being Muslim American.
Onward,
SURJ NYC