By Wasima Khan
By the time the second tower fell, the world had already changed. The air itself had thickened, as if something massive had broken in the sky and drifted across the Atlantic to settle even in the damp autumn streets of our Dutch seaside city. I was a teenager then, old enough to notice how people looked at us differently, but not yet old enough to know that some looks carry the sharpness of centuries.
In the hours and days that followed 9/11, our living room in The Hague stayed tuned to CNN, even though the adults rarely watched foreign news. My parents had moved there from Pakistan more than two decades earlier. Though they were no longer new, they were not native either. My mother, in her navy blue hijab with its floral edge, sat silent on the couch, hands folded in her lap like she was bracing for news that had already arrived. My father stood near the television, his brows folded not in surprise, but in a kind of recognition. As if he had been waiting for something like this, as though history had simply kept its promise.
“People will blame us,” he said, almost to himself. “They will not care who did it.” I didn’t understand what he meant then, not entirely. But by the end of that week, I was beginning to learn. In school, my Dutch classmates turned curious first, then cautious. I had grown used to the gentle teasing about Ramadan or why I couldn’t eat the meat from the school cafeteria. But now, there was a charge behind the questions: Do you think what they did was okay? Are you happy now? One boy, Tom, who had once shared his stroopwafels with me during break, whispered to another that I was “one of them.” The way he said them made it clear we had all been divided again along invisible lines that had never fully disappeared.
Our imam warned us: Be patient. Be careful. Do not provoke. But what provoked people now? A beard? A headscarf? A name that ended in “-ullah”? We were children of immigrants, born in the wreckage of our parents’ broken hopes, raised in the blank spaces between cultures. And now, we were suddenly inheritors of blame. On television, the news repeated the same footage over and over: planes slicing through steel, clouds of ash chasing terrified people down New York avenues, presidents promising vengeance. And somewhere in between, the words Muslim and terrorist began to fold into each other until they became almost indistinguishable.
What haunted me most wasn’t the insults—though they came, muttered from the safety of bicycle seats or written in marker on the walls near the tram stop. What stayed with me was how quickly we became cautious with ourselves. We began to speak more softly. My hijabs grew more neutral—beige, grey, soft brown—like camouflage. The call to prayer at the mosque was lowered, as though devotion, too, must be discreet.
We were still here. And yet, in so many ways, we remained invisible. We were there in the corner shops and on the hospital night shifts, in the classrooms and behind the wheels of the trams. But in the stories being told—in newspapers, in newsrooms, in books and movies—we were shadows. If we appeared at all, it was as suspects or statistics.
I noticed how, slowly, my own memories began to divide themselves into before and after. Before 9/11, I believed that being Muslim was just one part of me, like being left-handed or loving rainstorms. It wasn’t something I had to perform or defend. Afterward, it became a defining border. Everything I said, did, wore—even the silences I kept—became loaded with meanings I had not assigned.
A friend of my father’s, a Somali man named Bashir, had lived in Rotterdam for over twenty years. “This is the cycle,” he told us one evening, sipping mint tea. “They invite us to help build the country. Then they punish us for being here.” He chuckled softly, but it wasn’t from humor. “Now our children will learn how to carry suspicion like luggage.” And we did. I carried it on trams and into exam halls. In job interviews, where my last name drew pauses. At airports, where I learned to smile too much and answer too precisely.
Years later, I visited Manhattan. I stood at Ground Zero in silence, surrounded by tourists holding phones and maps. It felt sacred, but also stage-managed. I saw my own reflection in the black stone of the memorial, and behind me, a man watched me for a little too long. I smiled politely. He didn’t smile back. But I no longer flinched. By then, I had learned that the world does not always want to understand you. Sometimes, it only wants to hold you responsible.
In the United States, too, the air never truly cleared. After 9/11, reported hate crimes against Muslim Americans spiked sharply. Family restaurants were burned, anti-Islam rallies were held, and innocent Arab men were shot to death inside their own convenience stores. The Southern Poverty Law Center documented waves of bias and violence, each one a reminder that 9/11’s aftermath could linger not just in headlines but in bruised faces and shuttered shops. Being Muslim in the United States became a quiet calculation: which neighborhoods felt safe, whether to lower one’s voice when speaking Arabic in public, and how to answer the inevitable question about where you’re really from.
Zohran Mamdani, in his campaign for mayor of New York City, tried to give that quiet calculation a voice. Late October 2025, standing outside a Bronx mosque, he spoke of a well-meaning Muslim uncle who advised him to downplay his religion in public. And he spoke of his late Aunt Zehra—fuhi, as he explained in Urdu, referring to a paternal cousin he had always called “aunt”—trembling at the thought of boarding the subway in her hijab after 9/11. His words were meant to speak to a collective memory of the Muslim community being marked and measured, to name something that had been lived rather than imagined. Yet the moment ignited a storm.
Critics mocked the story, questioned its details, and some refused to see it as anything more than political theater. Vice President JD Vance took to social media to sneer that “the real victim” of 9/11 was supposedly Mamdani’s “auntie who got some (allegedly) bad looks.” Others insisted that focusing on the discrimination that Muslim Americans faced somehow minimized the horrors of the attacks themselves. What that backlash revealed, perhaps unintentionally, was that the boundaries of empathy are still contested, and that for many American Muslims, the pain of exclusion does not end with time, it only takes on new shapes.
Teenagers now only know 9/11 through videos and assignments. Sometimes they ask, Was it really that bad? And I want to say: no, not always. We survived. But survival is not the absence of harm. It’s the ability to breathe even when the air has turned thick with smoke. It’s learning how to live with the knowledge that you are seen not as who you are, but as what people fear.
In the years after 9/11, laws, too, collapsed and were rebuilt with suspicion baked into their foundations. Across the West, anti-terrorism legislation emerged with the urgency of fire alarms, each promising safety, order, and justice. But beneath the language of security was a quieter truth: these laws did not treat all citizens equally. They were crafted with a profile in mind; a silhouette of a threat that always seemed to resemble a Muslim. Mosques were quietly monitored. Immigration systems hardened. Travel was scrutinized. Entire generations of Muslims have now grown up under the gaze of these policies, having their beliefs interrogated under the guise of “counter-radicalization.”
What began as an exceptional response to an exceptional tragedy became routine. Laws, like memory, have long shadows. And 9/11 cast one that still stretches across our lives. So, although time dulls memory, I can’t help but remember that, even in the Netherlands, where tulips bloomed and canals shimmered, the air changed that day. Something cracked. A trust, perhaps. A sense of belonging.
We all breathed it. We all tasted the smoke. We still do.
Wasima Khan is a Pakistani-Dutch writer, poet, and jurist from The Hague, the Netherlands. She is the winner of the 2025 Willow Springs Surrealist Poetry Prize and the 2026 Blue Frog Flash Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in About Place Journal, Fourteen Hills, Soundings East, Santa Fe Literary Review, Sky Island Journal, and elsewhere. Khan’s work can be found at https://www.wasimakhan.com.