New Delhi: 25 years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Muslim Americans continue to face discrimination and negative representation, even as the community has grown in size and political visibility, according to a new data essay by the Pew Research Center.
The research, titled “25 Years after 9/11, a Portrait of Muslim Americans”, was published on 3 September and is based on Pew’s surveys spanning 25 years, federal hate-crime statistics and data on the growth of mosques and the Muslim population in the United States.
The data includes research that was supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts (Pew Research Center’s primary funder), the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton Religion Trust, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations and the El-Hibri Foundation.
Negative perception towards U.S. Muslims
The survey conducted between May 4-17, 2026, found that 43 per cent of U.S. adults consider Muslims less patriotic than other Americans, while 42 per cent believe Muslim Americans have a negative impact on the country.
Views that Islam encourages violence more than other religions stood at 51 per cent as of early 2026 – a sharp rise from the 2002 data, which stood at 25 per cent.
The issue has also become more politically polarised. 76 per cent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents said Islam encourages violence, compared with 29 per cent of Democrats and Democratic leaners. In 2002, the corresponding figures were 32 per cent and 23 per cent.
Discrimination and media representation
Further, the data highlighted that as of May 2026, most U.S. Muslims reported “a lot” of discrimination against Muslims in the country and that media portrayals of Muslims are often unfair. Younger Muslims were more likely than older ones to view media coverage as unfair.
Earlier surveys conducted in 2017 hint at variations in reported discrimination across demographic groups. According to this survey, U.S. born Muslims were more likely than immigrant Muslims to report experiencing discrimination. Further, visibly identifiable Muslims, including women who wear headscarves, have also reportedly faced discrimination more than others.
One theory from a 2017 study is that younger Muslims and those born in the U.S. are more impatient for social change and perhaps also more confident in their ability to effect it.
But alongside these reports of discrimination, Muslim Americans also say someone has expressed support for them because of their religion. In the 2017 survey, this share was 49 per cent (in the past year). In the 2026 survey, this share stands at 34 per cent (in the past year).
A growing muslim population
These data come against the backdrop of an increasing Muslim population in the U.S., which is an estimated 5.5 million people of all ages, up from 2.4 million in 2007. The number of mosques has also increased from about 1,200 in 2000 to roughly 2,800 in 2020.
FBI hate-crime data show reported anti-Muslim incidents spiked to 481 in 2001, up from 28 the year before, and have since fluctuated but never returned to pre-9/11 levels.
19 jihadists extinguished 3,000 lives while explicitly citing scripture, and twenty-five years later the blogger runs a tear-jerker about how hard it is for everyone else because the public developed a basic survival instinct.
I was looking for a single sentence of honest and objective analysis for why that public caution exists, and she offered none.
Calling ordinary citizens ‘biased’ for watching their own backs, while you hide the root causes makes you a gaslighter.
This is the ultimate narrative inversion that yoi read in victimhhod blogs…here, you erase the mass murder, erase the explicit jihadist theological justification, and convert a catastrophic act into a sob story about hurt feelings and ‘unfair media coverage.’
A society where your population doubles to 5.5 million, your places of worship grew from 1,200 to 2,800, and you collect seats in the U.S. Congress isn’t ‘oppressing’ you. Public suspicion didn’t pop out of a vacuum because Americans woke up bored and decided to be ‘biased.’ It came from watching towers fall to people invoking those exact sources that you missed. It came by observing news from all over the world over the last 25 years.
Whining about societal judgment while refusing to touch the ideology that pulled the trigger is self-absolving cowardice.
People are right to be concerned, right to be suspicious, and right to fear. The onus was on you, and continues to be.