Three years after 9/11, I was twenty years old and dating an aspiring pilot. An undercurrent of anxiety ran through him, and it wasn’t only because the airline industry is notoriously hard to break into. His last name was, literally, Islam and he was training to soar through the skies as a Muslim kid from Brooklyn.
He warned me the FBI might come knocking. They’d already interrogated an ex-girlfriend of his. They knew where he was going and what he was doing at all times. He’d grown up in Kensington, in a heavily South Asian, heavily Muslim pocket and after 9/11, neighborhoods like his were among the most surveilled in the city. The NYPD sent plainclothes officers to map where Muslims prayed, ate, and shopped. Informants sat in the mosques.
Knowing all of that, I still wonder, to this day, why he decided to become a pilot just three years after the towers fell.
We dated for two years. I watched him get rejected from job after job, and then, finally, get hired. For years I had no idea what became of him. I googled him recently and found out he’s no longer a pilot, he owns a construction company in Maryland now.
I’ve thought long and hard about what I wanted Port of Entry to add to the 25 years since 9/11 conversation. What feels missing to me are stories like my ex’s. Stories like mine. Young Muslim New Yorkers who created lives despite what we were up against, intertwined with the way we never fully get to grieve what happened to our city. From day one, it was a day shrouded in a cloud of blame, guilt, and shame—for Muslims of every kind.
I was just starting my senior year at the Bronx High School of Science. Students with parents who worked in Manhattan rushed to the pay phones in the lobby. My mom worked in Midtown, and I went out of my mind trying to reach her, until I realized she’d been home that day.
The subways were shut, so those of us from Queens crowded onto school buses that ordinarily kids who paid for the service used. My best friend and I got off in a part of the borough miles away from where we lived. We started walking to her house because it was closest. Bodega owners handed us water bottles as we trekked under the sun for hours. My parents didn’t have a car, so my uncle came to pick me up from her house. He had to drive slowly, because none of the traffic lights were working. For days afterwards we watched the coverage on television. We were cozy in our home, but no one was comfortable.
My mom had just started wearing hijab. We made her take it off.
Before that day, I was Bengali first. We celebrated Ramadan, we prayed—but religion was separate from the other parts of my identity. The shift, where faith became the entire way others saw my people, came after. My first name is Jennifer. I’m not visibly Muslim. But once I told people I was, I saw the immediate shift and felt myself sometimes explaining that oh, but I’m secular, though. I started college the year after the twin towers fell and I leaned into the partying and the alcohol and the skimpy clothes.
I could keep my head down but I was still brown. South Asians, Arabs—we were all being blended into one another. Sikhs and Hindus were killed for simply being brown.
But my faith and my politics became inseparable as I got older and as I developed my craft as a reporter and journalist.
Anti-Muslim hatred is not a relic of 2001—it is being radicalized, out loud, right now. This past May, two young people opened fire outside the Islamic Center of San Diego, while a school was in session and approximately hundred and forty children were inside. The shooters livestreamed it and left behind a manifesto that reached back to the Christchurch massacre.
The first Muslim mayor of New York City was asked not to attend the twenty-fifth memorial. The man who runs this city—who won by nearly nine points, in the highest turnout the city had seen since 1969 is being told by the likes of Rudy Giuliani, who was mayor during 9/11, that he shouldn’t be there. A councilwoman from Queens, Vickie Paladino, brought a petition of a hundred thousand names to the steps of City Hall and demanded he not show his face on “sacred ground”—the same councilwoman who, months before, said Muslims should be removed from Western countries.
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This morning, Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood among the families at Ground Zero as he should as the steward of this city we all call home. In his address, he did not talk about his Muslim identity, he did not talk about anti-muslim hate or islamophobia. He talked about what the greatest city in the world lost twenty-five years ago and how we need to take care of each other now as we had done then.
Seeing him on the screen made me feel like, maybe, just maybe, I have permission to fully grieve, after twenty-five years, for the city of my birth.
I love this. I thought this morning about how many stories we still haven't heard about that day, even now a whole adulthood later. About how Mamdani had only been in the U.S. for a short time when this happened and here he was trying to lead us through the remnants of it
Oh my I can’t even imagine trying to get a pilot job with the last name Islam after 9/11!
It’s crazy to think about 9/11 - 3K lives lost, but reportedly 900K people dead between Iraq and Afghanistan in the ensuing wars. We’ve come a long way, I pray for more peace and understanding.