It’s midday on a Friday at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center in Roxbury, the largest mosque in New England.
More than a thousand men, women and children of all different ethnic backgrounds stream in. Some head to the mosque’s cafe, where they catch up with each other over chai tea and baklava. Then, people gather in the carpeted prayer hall, take off their shoes and sit down for the Friday Jum’ah service.
On this day, the imam leading the service devotes his sermon to the power of emotion, and harnessing it to help society even when times are tough.
“The strong person is not the one who overpowers others. But the strong are only those who control themselves when they are angry,” he said.
Compare this ordinary scene from a place of worship with the way Muslims say their community has been portrayed and treated since the Sept. 11 attacks.
The extremists responsible for 9/11 invoked Islam to justify their actions, putting ordinary Muslims in the United States on the defensive about their faith and contributing to a surge in Islamophobic prejudice and discrimination in the months that followed.
Since then, the anti-Muslim backlash has continued in waves, involving hate crimes, government surveillance and travel bans. Now, 25 years after 9/11, many Muslims still feel like pariahs even though they’ve worked tirelessly to strengthen relations with their neighbors, become more politically engaged and push back against perceptions of Islam shaped by the extremists who carried out the attacks.
“You have people who do not understand Islam, who hate Islam,” said Sayem Khan, a Cambridge architect. “There’s people out there — evil out there — that’s really just looking to wipe us out.”
Khan and other Muslims across Massachusetts are quick to note that their experiences following 9/11 don’t take away from the horror of the attacks. They say they, like the rest of the country, sympathize with the victims, their families and everyone else who has felt the effects of that day.
At the same time, Muslims in the United States say it’s been a long quarter of a century for their community.
Immediately after 9/11, the federal government rounded up and deported thousands of people across the country, mostly Muslims, even though many of them had never committed any criminal offense. The FBI deployed informants and undercover agents into mosques to spy on the Muslim community under the broad banner of national security.
In Massachusetts, Muslims watched violent hate crimes spike. Mosques and Muslim-owned businesses were vandalized, employees were fired and renters were denied apartments.
Rashid Ashraf, a member of the board of trustees at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, recalls people questioning if he was a terrorist. Someone asked him why Muslims haven’t apologized for 9/11.
“The person that asked me this was Catholic, and I said, ‘Why don’t you apologize to me for what the church has done to young children. It’s a ridiculous thing for me to ask you to apologize because you have nothing to do with clergy, like I have nothing to do with 9/11,”’ Ashraf said.
For Tahirah Amatul-Wadud, reflecting on the anti-Muslim backlash still brings powerful emotions.
Amatul-Wadud, now executive director of the Massachusetts chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations, remembers running for Congress years ago. She wanted her campaign to focus on issues like healthcare policy and the cost of daycare. Instead, she faced threats of violence and false accusations that she wanted to enact Islamic Sharia law. She felt the need to explain to people that she was more than a Muslim woman wearing a hijab.
“It was very painful,” Amatul-Wadud said. “Every day, I woke up and I was having to humanize myself … I was very much burdened to have to almost seek permission to be standing in that room asking for their vote. No other candidate has that burden.”
Amatul-Wadud and other Muslims in Massachusetts noticed that at one point around 2012, the backlash seemed to level off — that is, until the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.
Khan, the architect from Cambridge, said as soon he learned the Tsarnaev brothers were Muslims, he couldn’t avoid anticipating the obvious: a fresh wave of anti-Muslim hatred.
“It portrays everyone as terrorists,” Khan said. “That image did not represent Islam. I believe we represent what is good.”
More recently, documented incidents of Islamophobia have remained high in Massachusetts, often in the form of workplace discrimination and bullying in schools, according to the state chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations. That’s amid the war in Iran, continuing instability in Gaza and frequent anti-Muslim rhetoric from the Trump administration.
Muslim community leaders say women who wear hijab often experience an especially high rate of harassment because their Islamic faith is more visible in public.
Ihab Dabbagh, a member of the board of trustees at the Islamic Society of Worcester, noted that the anti-Islamic backlash over the last 25 years has culminated in Muslims reacting to breaking news events in a unique way.
“If [there’s] any incident in any state, I swear, first thing my wife will ask me is, ‘Is he a Muslim? I hope he’s not a Muslim,'” Dabbagh said.
Despite the waves of backlash, Muslims in Massachusetts say they’ve grown closer with each other and others who have shown support over the years, including during the war in Gaza. Dabbagh said that’s a big difference from before 9/11, when many Muslims had a tendency to isolate within their own bubble of family and friends.
Abdulqadir Farah, the lead imam at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center in Roxbury, said the community has also leaned into one of the main principles of Islam.
“The idea of resilience. That there’s always going to be bad things that we have to deal with and we’re going to come out of it,” he said. “There’s more good in this country than there is bad.”
