A Muslim American reflection on 9/11 and its aftermath
I was born here in New York City, but not the New York City you’re thinking of. My New York City was Brooklyn, but not the Brooklyn you’re thinking of, either. I am a native son of the deepest edge of Brooklyn, the part of the city that no one really thinks of as “The City.” Where I grew up, English might have been spoken as a third language. Everyone knew you and your family. Life moved at a slower pace, and everything you needed was within a 10-block radius. That was home. The place we called Manhattan — “The City” — was something far off and different; we looked to it with conflicting feelings of aspiration and envy. Maybe one day we’ll make it there. Or maybe we won’t. They don’t think much of us there, anyway. Growing up, Manhattan was always a symbol, until one day it wasn’t.
I got the news that the Twin Towers had been attacked while watching TV in my childhood apartment. Unlike most 8-year-olds at the time, I wasn’t in school that Tuesday. I had just returned from a family trip overseas and fell ill upon our return. It was the moment that Manhattan ceased to be just a symbol, but I was too young to fully know what I was seeing unfold before me. A part of the city was destroyed, but a new city would be born from the embers, and the question arising from that rebirth is one I engage almost every day in my line of work as a public historian and walking tour guide: How do we remember New York?
For a long time, September 11 was a date I preferred to not think about, because it evoked a double trauma for me: The first was of the attack itself, and the second was of being told that I could not mourn the attack. In fact, the mourning was sometimes channeled into a weapon, and I was its target. Muslim New Yorkers were never fully allowed to grieve as New Yorkers because we had to constantly defend ourselves as Muslims. The vocabulary of our city had changed: terms like “national security,” “terrorism” and “surveillance” gained a new, charged valence, and they all involved people who looked like me and my family.
Downtown Manhattan is where the towers were and where they fell, but the question of what our city became after the attacks was answered in neighborhoods in all five boroughs, from Brighton Beach to Fordham Heights, Tompkinsville to Jamaica. While the new memorial was being built on Ground Zero, real memories were being forged in the everyday lives of New Yorkers, where our social trust for each other would be tested against our social fears of each other. “If you see something, say something,” the phrase became. This was the city I came up in.
Over a decade after the attacks, when I had reached college, I co-founded with a group of friends a Muslim faith-based charity organization dedicated to fighting food insecurity. Our project was simple: We’d collectively chip in some money each week from our allowances or internships and use it to buy groceries, which we’d then deliver to families all over town. This was how I spent my weekends and how I made new friends. One of those friends grew particularly close to me, volunteering often with my charity, getting to know everyone around me, and even sleeping over at my place.
I was to later learn that this young man — a teenager like me — was a police informant. And like me, he was targeted by New York, though differently. He was a troubled youth of South Asian Muslim background who was arrested on drug charges and told that his options were to either surveil for the police or face jail time. And so, he did what most of us might’ve done if we were in his circumstances. My friends and I were the targets of his surveillance, and yet both he and I became victims of a city that decided that neither of us truly belonged or mattered.
It wasn’t long until I would be convinced to join a lawsuit led by a clinic at CUNY Law School and the ACLU to challenge the NYPD for surveilling not just me, but the entire Muslim community of New York City. We were all suspects in a post-9/11 city, and the social devastation and loss of trust that it engendered had taken a tremendous toll on us. Our lawsuit lasted several years, and as I transitioned from college into the professional world, we won a settlement that finally brought relief: The discriminatory surveillance of Muslim New Yorkers would come to an end, civil liberty protections would be put into place for all New Yorkers, and a new chapter of the city would be written.
The truth is that New York did not have a clean, romantic story after September 11. My own ordeal demonstrates that there are things we could have done differently. In our remembrance of those whom we lost, we forgot who we were, and for some of us, the post-9/11 city was not experienced through solidarity but through surveillance. We had to fight to be included in the city’s collective memory. But there is something that makes New York different — and that is the fact that the city did become a better version of itself. Not only did we end the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims, but our city also elected a Muslim mayor (who happens to be my good friend).
People often ask me how I can love a city that surveilled me. My answer is simple: I refuse to surrender to those who say that I don’t belong here. I guess that stubbornness is what most makes me a New Yorker. To choose to love New York is to enter a toxic relationship: You’ll say you love the city, but it will find a million ways to test your love and then dare you to love it again. Sometimes that can be a dispute with your landlord, or it can be a shouting match with a driver who turned too quickly as you were crossing the street, or it can be the police targeting you for who you are. New York forces you to redeem it. And it was through the city’s redemption that I came to love it once more.
Today I serve as the official borough historian of Brooklyn. The same city that once surveilled me has entrusted me with the enormous responsibility of remembering and sharing the stories of its most populous borough. I run my own walking tour company, where I do exactly that on the streets where memories are made. I also teach New York City history to college students — nearly all of whom were born after September 11 — and give guided tours at the Museum of the City of New York. My job is to help you remember. But I cannot shed my activist skin, and in that vein, my job is to help you imagine what’s possible, what New York can become.
Very recently, I came to realize that as a late millennial, I belong to the youngest generation to have a working memory of September 11 and its aftermath, and one day I will be part of the last generation to tell those stories. “The City” is no longer just a symbol; it’s very real. And I know the greatest tribute that I can offer to it at this moment is not to simply remember it as the city that once was, but to build it as the city that, after all these years, it is still trying to become. I will do exactly that.
