Today marks the 25th anniversary of 9/11. I still remember watching it as a teenager, seeing those images all over the news. Anyone who watched it unfold at the time would understand how unreal and shocking it felt — a feeling perhaps easier to share with those who remember it than to describe in words.
At the time, I had no idea how one attack would go on to change so much around us — geopolitics, wars, economies and societies. I had even less idea how, over the years, my own identity as a Muslim, and the way Muslim identity was seen and discussed around the world, would change with it.
Looking back, I find myself caught between two conversations that have grown louder since then. One treats Muslims collectively as a threat. The other, within parts of the Muslim community, sometimes treats difficult questions about religion, extremism or reform as attacks that must simply be rejected.
I have never been comfortable with either.
But interestingly, as an Indian Muslim at that time, I don’t remember 9/11 feeling immediately connected to my own Indian Muslim identity. The names on the news—Taliban and Al-Qaeda—moved through a faraway political mist, strangers wearing a faith we shared in name, but little else. It was happening somewhere else, involving people who seemed very far removed from our everyday lives.
Unique burden
For most ordinary Muslims around me, geopolitics soon gave way to more immediate concerns — work, family, making it to Jummah on time, whether there was enough salt in the biryani, and the everyday struggle to put food on the table.
I consider myself lucky to have been born and brought up in a defence society, as my father was serving in the Indian Navy. It was an environment where my religious identity did not matter much. But later, when I moved into civilian society, I began noticing a slight difference. Comments like “aap log Muslim nahi lagte” (you people don’t look Muslim) became so common that I remember my sister once replying out of irritation, “Toh Muslims ke singh (horns) hote hain kya? (Do Muslims have horns or something?)”
I also realised that there was another complication that Muslims in India had to deal with: Pakistan. And then there were certain stereotypes because of the poor socio-economic condition of a large section of the community. For the most part, I believed people carrying such stereotypes were simply biased, but I also blamed some within the community for feeding them.
During India-Pakistan cricket matches, I would hear complaints about some Muslims celebrating a Pakistani victory. Such people existed, though I never believed they represented anything close to the majority. And as a young person, the obvious question in my mind was: if you support Pakistan over India, then why are you still living in India, especially when your people had the option to choose?
Yet, that burden did not feel unique. To be a Muslim in India was to carry a stereotype, but in our crowded country, almost everyone carried a label shaped by caste, region, or dialect. I never felt marked by a birthright of victimhood. I felt like an equal citizen, navigating a world where prejudice was a common weed, growing even within the walls of my own community. Real life happened in the spaces between these biases. We did business together, shared meals, crossed thresholds to celebrate each other’s joys, and built lasting friendships. Like the rest of India, we simply learned to manage the friction, balancing our lives within the beautiful, messy contradictions of a shared existence.
But in the years after 9/11, something did begin to change. I remember a growing interest, and perhaps anxiety, among people trying to understand whether Islam and Muslims themselves posed some kind of threat. Terrorism was no longer seen only as a security problem to be handled by armies, intelligence agencies or police. The frightening idea was that an apparently ordinary person could suddenly attack civilians who had no defence. And as more such attacks and incidents followed, people naturally started asking: where does this come from? Is it political, religious, ideological, or some mixture of all three?
As a Muslim, I already had plenty of questions about religion myself. From childhood, I had a habit of asking counter-questions and sometimes raising my voice even within my own family. But I had never understood Islam as having any attachment to violence against innocent people. The wars we read about in Islamic history belonged, in my mind, to an older world where kings, kingdoms and empires regularly fought one another. We don’t live in that world anymore. We had democracy — jamhooriyat — and the freedom to live, work, pray and follow our own way of life.
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Tug of war between blaming and defending
For me, being Muslim was much more about the struggle with your own self, trying to remain on the right path, maintaining your imaan, doing what is right and avoiding what is wrong. It was personal before it was political.
But gradually, I started coming across comments, posts and articles asking much harder questions about Islam itself. Questions I had rarely encountered while growing up. And for the first time, I found myself not only thinking about what Islam meant to me, but also confronting what other people had begun to believe Islam meant to them.
I learned words like taqiyya from social media, which, as a Muslim, I had never even heard of growing up. There were many stereotypes, but slowly some of them crossed a boundary. It was no longer that Indian Muslims have this or that problem and we should work on it. It became sentences like, all Muslims across the world are so and so. The good thing was that mostly I saw this on social media. But I also saw some social media influencers making big careers out of using almost every opportunity to dehumanise Indian Muslims and project them as a threat to everyone.
But what I witnessed within the community was also frustrating — a senseless defensive attitude. Nobody wanted to talk about anything or take accountability. Nobody seemed ready to introspect, and if someone did raise such questions, those voices could immediately be shunned. I always wondered: if people have so much faith in their imaan and their religion, then why can’t we have an open and honest conversation and address difficult issues?
What was particularly painful for me was seeing, after an Islamist terror attack, some Muslims worrying more about how it would bring a bad name to Islam than about the people who had actually been killed. Why should that be the first concern?
Some victims were Muslims and non-Muslims. There were Muslim youth getting radicalised to commit such heinous crimes, destroying their own lives and the lives of innocent people. And then millions of ordinary Muslims faced the ripple effects of these acts. Yet our religious and community leaders often seemed more interested either in repeating “this is not Islam” or immediately talking about Muslim victimhood.
I don’t think saying “this is not Islam” is wrong. But surely there has to be another question after that: then what is happening, and why? If young Muslims are being radicalised using the language of our religion, shouldn’t we be among the first people willing to understand it and confront it?
We are still not ready to accept or openly discuss within the community that there are many interpretations of Islam, and extremist movements also construct their own interpretations of religious texts and history to justify what they do. It is almost ironic that one terrorist group can consider another terrorist group un-Islamic and even issue a fatwa against them. Everyone somehow believes that only their interpretation is the correct one.
But if we accept that different interpretations exist, then we also have to accept something else: there has to be space for disagreement. Someone who interprets religion differently from you, or even chooses not to follow your interpretation at all, has the same right to exist as you do. The answer cannot be the idea of silencing, punishing or eliminating those who disagree.
For me, interpretation that takes account of time, context and the reality of the world we live in is an important part of the way ahead.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, we are still caught between those who want to blame an entire religion and those who think defending the religion means refusing to ask difficult questions about anything done in its name. Rejecting collective blame does not require rejecting introspection. Neither dehumanisation from outside nor denial from within is going to take us forward.
Amana Begam Ansari is a columnist, writer, and TV news panellist. She runs a weekly YouTube show called ‘India This Week by Amana and Khalid’. She tweets @Amana_Ansari. Views are personal.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)