Muslim Children Should Not Carry the Burden of the 9/11 Attacks

Muslim children were not born carrying the weight of 9/11. Society placed it on their shoulders. It is time for us to take it off.

As a child, I was called a "camel queen" by my teachers. Years later, while I was pregnant, a college professor looked at my stomach and joked in front of the whole class that I might have a "bomb" under there.

He was talking about my unborn child.

What has stayed with me all these years is not only the cruelty of the remark. It was where it happened. The comment came from a professor, in a classroom, an environment that should have been a place of learning, respect, and safety.

I hear from young people who become anxious when classroom discussions turn to terrorism or September 11. Not because they do not want to learn history, but because they worry the conversation will somehow become about them.

In that moment, I was not seen as a student, a mother-to-be, or a human being. I was seen through the lens of a vicious stereotype.

That moment taught me something I have never forgotten: Anti-Muslim prejudice is not always loud or obvious. Sometimes it appears as a joke. Sometimes it appears as an assumption. Sometimes it appears in the expectation that Muslims must constantly prove that they are not what others fear they might be.

My experience is not unique. In May, a 12-year-old Muslim student in Connecticut was reportedly subjected to repeated harassment and called anti-Muslim names. In a sign of the times, the Danbury Police Department searched the family’s home for weapons after allegations were made against the student.

In a 2025 survey of Muslims, the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), found, “Forty-seven percent of Muslim families with school-aged children report having a child who faced religious-based bullying in the past year, compared with 23% among the general public.”

Like many Muslim children, I learned early what it felt like to be viewed as different, foreign, or less worthy. Those experiences leave scars that are difficult to explain to people who have never lived them.

Today, I see those same burdens carried by Muslim students.

I hear from young people who become anxious when classroom discussions turn to terrorism or September 11. Not because they do not want to learn history, but because they worry the conversation will somehow become about them.

They wonder whether classmates will look at them and make jokes.

They wonder whether they will be expected to condemn atrocities they had nothing to do with.

No child should have to carry that burden.

This week, the organization I work for issued its Back to School Resource Guide for 2026-2027, which I authored. The guide gives teachers tips on how to discuss challenging topics with students, including providing comprehensive lesson plans that address the 9/11 attacks, specifically the victims and families impacted; the aftermath of the attacks, such as the war in Afghanistan; changes in national security; and the rise of hate crimes and discrimination against American Muslim communities.

The purpose of educational resources that address bias and inclusion is not to rewrite history or erase the tragedy of September 11. Muslims, like millions of other Americans, mourned the victims of al Qaeda’s vicious attacks. We condemned the perpetrators then, and we continue to condemn them today.

The purpose is much simpler: to help ensure that students can learn about difficult moments in history without becoming targets themselves.

Every child should be able to learn about 9/11. Every child should learn about the devastating consequences of hatred, extremism, and violence. But no child should be made to feel responsible for those events simply because they share a faith with the people who hijacked it.

I am no longer the little girl being mocked on the playground by teachers. I am no longer the college student sitting in a classroom while a professor jokes about my unborn child. But children today face many of the same assumptions.

Our children deserve better than that. They deserve classrooms where they are seen as students, not suspects. They deserve the freedom to learn about history without being associated with its worst actors. And they deserve a future in which their identity is not treated as a source of suspicion.

Most of all, they deserve to be children, free from the burden of defending themselves against crimes they did not commit.