After 9/11

By Iqbal Akhtar

Sunday, September 13, 2026

 

On September 4, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani signed two executive orders ahead of the 25^th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. One made the date a citywide day of remembrance and service; the other tightened the city’s preparations against future terrorism. When he finished, he handed the ceremonial pen to Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch and asked her to pass it along. She gave it to Ramzi Kassem, the city’s chief counsel, whose office had drafted the orders. Kassem, a civil rights lawyer, once represented Ahmed al-Darbi, a Guantanamo Bay detainee who pleaded guilty to terrorism charges and whose brother-in-law, Khalid al-Mihdhar, helped fly American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. By the weekend, families of the dead were asking the mayor not to come to the 9/11 memorial ceremony.

 

The mayor’s office was probably right that the gesture was routine. Counsel drafts the order, counsel gets the pen. But that is exactly the problem. A quarter century after the attacks, a Muslim mayor of New York and his Muslim chief counsel did not see what everyone else in the room saw. The last time this happened at scale was 2010, when a proposal to build an Islamic community center two blocks from the World Trade Center site, first called Cordoba House and then Park51, set off months of national argument. Its sponsors were sincere. They were also astonished by the reaction, which told you everything about how little they understood the importance of 9/11.

 

These episodes are not accidents of individual judgment. They are symptoms of a community that never did the introspection the 9/11 attacks demanded of it, and that instead built a politics organized around two things—denouncing Islamophobia and turning out voters—while leaving the deeper work undone. That work is theological and institutional before it is political, and it is the only path by which American Muslims can contribute to the American experiment without further polarizing it. And I make this argument as a fellow Muslim.

 

What the attacks asked of us.

 

I was a pre-med student at Washington University when the towers fell. Within months, I had abandoned medicine and changed my majors to political science and Jewish, Islamic, and Near Eastern Studies. Later, after a fellowship to study Pakistan's education system, I served as a civilian in the Air Force and worked as an analyst at U.S. Northern Command, the combatant command created after the attacks to defend the homeland. The experience of watching Islam and Muslims become the existential “other” of American life, almost overnight, was the most formative thing that ever happened to me, and I responded to it by trying to be inside the institutions that were now defining us from outside, such as the military.

 

Neither side quite knew what to do with me. Inside the military, I faced the questions about loyalty you would expect. In my own community, the hostility was sharper. I was trying to get married in those years, and more than one family turned me away because of the uniform. The question I was living, which is the question every American Muslim has been living since 2001, whether they admit it or not, is how one remains faithful to an ancient religion and to a nation whose security is purchased, in part, through violence against people who share that religion. That is not an easy question. It deserved a generation of serious thought. It mostly did not get it.

 

Three evasions.

 

What the American Muslim community produced instead were three ways of not answering. The first was disavowal: The 9/11 hijackers were Saudis and Egyptians, not Americans, so the attacks had nothing to do with us.

 

This was true as far as it went and useless as a response, because it treated the question of Islam's relationship to the American project as if it had been asked in bad faith. Some of it had been. Much of it had not. Ordinary Americans legitimately asked why Muslims did not condemn terrorism, or whether Islam needed a reformation. Muslims did condemn, constantly, and the media often failed to carry it. But behind “Why don’t you condemn?” sat a deeper question about compatibility, and behind “Does Islam need a reformation?” sat a deeper question about authority and interpretation, and the legacy American Muslim community’s leadership treated both as public relations problems rather than as invitations to think.

 

The second evasion was conspiracy. A meaningful minority of American Muslims, and a larger share of the global community, embraced accounts of the attacks that placed Jews generally and the Mossad in particular behind the attacks of 9/11. This was poison, and it was allowed to circulate in mosques and family WhatsApp groups with far less internal resistance than it should have met.

 

The third evasion, and the one that has proven most durable, was to reclassify every criticism as bigotry. Here, the community’s response fused with a strand of the American left that sees history as a permanent contest between the powerful and the powerless. Call it third-worldism, or simply the habit of reading every conflict through the lens of colonizer and colonized. Within that frame, American Muslims, mostly brown and black, are permanent victims of the American experiment, and any demand that they examine themselves is itself an act of oppression. It is a comfortable place to stand. It is also a place from which no positive account of what Muslims are for, as Americans, can ever be built.

 

Institutions we built and the ones we didn’t.

 

Look at what American Muslim organizations actually did with the last 25 years. They built a civil rights apparatus to document and litigate discrimination, and they built get-out-the-vote machinery, first in defensive coalitions and lately in the increasingly assertive campaigns in Michigan, New York, and elsewhere. Both are legitimate. Neither is sufficient.

 

In July, Sada Cumber, who served as George W. Bush’s envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, wrote a piece for the National Security Institute arguing that Muslims in the West have “passion without coordination, resources without strategy, representation without institutional depth.” He held up the Jewish American experience as something to learn from: a community that answered exclusion by building legal organizations, philanthropies, media relationships, and a public intellectual life that could tell its own story.

 

Cumber is right, and I want to pull his argument one step back:  Institutions are downstream of ideas. The Jewish institutions he admires were built on a theological foundation laid by Reform Judaism in the 19^th century, which reworked a covenantal tradition into a vocabulary, tikkun olam (the repair of the world), that any American could understand and many non-Jews adopted. Liberal Protestantism did the same thing so successfully that its ethics became the default moral language of secular America. Even communities that chose separation—the Mennonites, the Amish, the Haredim—developed institutions capable of explaining themselves to the majority in terms the majority could respect.

 

American Islam has produced almost nothing comparable, though there are exceptions. Zaytuna College in Berkeley has spent two decades trying to articulate an Islamic tradition in conversation with the Western canon. But by and large, Muslim institutions in America run in two directions. Either they turn inward, cultivating a tradition insulated from the secular culture around it, or they turn outward into partisan identity politics that treats coalition-building across the political aisle as collaboration. Neither mode can explain to a non-Muslim American what Islam has to offer the country.

 

Where the evasions have led.

 

The consequences are visible in the news. In Texas, a master-planned community near Dallas sponsored by the East Plano Islamic Center, first called EPIC City and later renamed The Meadow, has been investigated by state and federal agencies, denounced by Gov. Greg Abbott as a development that “will never see the light of day,” and made the occasion for a new state law aimed at religious enclaves. The Justice Department and the Texas Workforce Commission found no evidence the project would exclude non-Muslims, and the fear-mongering around it was real. But the developers apparently never asked how a thousand-home Muslim town anchored by a mosque would read to their neighbors in a state where the memory of 9/11 is not abstract. Institutional exclusivity, even when legal and well-intentioned, is a choice with consequences, and a community serious about pluralism would have made a different choice.

 

The same shortsightedness shapes the political mobilization that has produced Mamdani and the campaigns in Michigan. Its animating energy is opposition to Israel, which means its practical effect is antagonism toward American Jews, the one religious minority whose efforts in institution building in this country Muslims most need to study.

 

And the community has still not made its peace with accountability. When the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, an Islamic charity, was convicted in 2008 of funneling money to Hamas, most mainstream Muslim organizations treated the verdict as persecution.

 

That reflex has never gone away. Anyone who cooperates with law enforcement against extremism, or who publicly distances the community from Hamas, is a sellout. Meanwhile the attacks keep coming. In March, a naturalized Lebanese American drove a truck into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan and opened fire, in what investigators called revenge for relatives killed in Israel’s war with Lebanon. Every such act resets the clock, and every time the community answers with a statement about Islamophobia rather than a reckoning with the currents inside it that produce these men. It should surprise no one that in Pew’s surveys of how Americans feel about religious groups, Muslims still sit near the bottom, keeping company only with atheists, and have barely moved in a generation.

 

The America that already exists.

 

None of this is the whole story. The lived reality of most American Muslims is pluralism, practiced daily and without ideology. I have called it “covenantal pluralism” elsewhere: the discovery, at PTA meetings and in hospital breakrooms and on corporate boards, that one can hold a demanding faith and still bind oneself in good faith to neighbors who do not share it. That is the raw material. What the community lacks is the translation.

 

The best model we have is 55 years old. In 1971, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned Muhammad Ali’s conviction for refusing induction into the Army, accepting that his objection to the Vietnam War was grounded in sincere religious belief. Ali did not win by denouncing his critics as bigots. He won by making his tradition legible in the moral and legal language of the majority, and in doing so he expanded American religious liberty for everyone. He was punished for it, stripped of his title and his best years. He was also, by the end of his life, among the most beloved Americans alive. That is what witnessing over winning looks like, and it is the tradition American Muslims have most neglected.

 

Theology before politics.

 

So what should the next 25 years look like? I would begin with a rule the Muslim world has been learning the hard way since Napoleon landed at Alexandria in 1798: Ideas precede reality, and theology precedes politics. Every modern Muslim political project, from Islamic modernism to the Muslim Brotherhood to the Iranian Revolution, was first a theological argument about what Islam is and what it demands. American Muslims have never made that argument for themselves. They have imported theologies built for other places and layered American electoral tactics on top.

 

The alternative is to build the institutions that can do the arguing: seminaries and colleges that read the Islamic tradition, in its philosophical and mystical and legal depth from West Africa to China, alongside John Locke and James Madison and Martin Luther King Jr.; think tanks that produce policy from a rational Muslim perspective rather than grievance; philanthropies that fund the professional class, which is the only base such institutions can stand on; and an intellectual culture in which a Muslim can criticize the community without being read out of it. But all this must be built on a theology of what Muslims owe America and what they have to offer it, not on a strategy for accumulating power.

 

The prize is larger than the community. A Muslim minority that worked out, in public and in American terms, how to be both fully Muslim and fully committed to a pluralist republic would be a model for Muslim minorities from Europe to India, and for Muslim majorities struggling with conflicts of power, wealth, and identity in their own countries. That contribution at the intersection of American and Islamic civilizations is worth more than any election. The country just marked its 250^th year. Muslims have been part of it from the beginning, among the enslaved and among the founders’ correspondents, and they have a claim on its next 250. Making that claim requires something the last quarter-century did not produce: the willingness to look at ourselves from the outside, and to build what we see is missing.