No, I Haven't Forgotten 9/11
Faith, Fear, and the Intolerance Directed at Our Muslim Neighbors
Audio Article Version
Print Version (PDF)
In recent conversations about Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign and eventual election to the United States Senate, I’ve found myself defending something that should never require a defense: a Muslim American’s right to be judged by his own words and actions, rather than by stereotypes that reduce an entire faith and its diverse cultures to the conduct of a small number of violent extremists.
First, let me get something out of the way. El-Sayed may turn out to be a poor senator, just as possibly as a great one. Time will tell. I have not endorsed his political platform, aside from the fact that I appreciate his opposition to Donald Trump, whose conduct I regard as a considerably more substantive threat to American democracy than the speculative dangers being attached to El-Sayed’s religion and ethnicity. But agreement with a person’s politics should not be required to defend him against prejudice. We ought to recognize an unjust accusation even when its target is someone we would be unlikely to vote for.
What concerns me is how readily political disagreement becomes a presumption of national disloyalty, and how comfortably some Christians seem to inhabit that presumption when the person in question is not like them, especially (it seems) if they are Muslim.
Invariably, all these conversations circle back to some variation of this loaded question:
“How could you forget 9/11?”
I haven’t forgotten 9/11, of course. But I find the question revealing, because when I think of Muslim Americans, my mind goes first to people I actually have known, not radical jihadists, not 9/11. Apparently, that is where our respective understandings begin to diverge.
THE NEIGHBORS I ACTUALLY KNOW
In college, I had two fairly close friends, at least for that season of life, who were Muslims from Dearborn, a community in metro Detroit with a long-established Muslim population. Their names were Ahmed and Jay, though Jay’s actual name was Mohammed. We hung out on campus throughout the week, frequently skipping class to play cards in the student center. We laughed and talked about our respective faiths, life, and the jobs we imagined ourselves doing someday. We enjoyed one another’s company. Occasionally, they would step away and go to a prayer room for salat. Sure, we were different. But mostly, I saw us as ordinary college guys finding common ground—including our reliably enthusiastic willingness to do something more interesting than attend class.
I had the opportunity to visit their homes a few times, where their families welcomed me like an honored guest. Their mothers fed me like a prince. I noticed how different these households were from my own, as well, especially in atmosphere and decor, but the hospitality was almost overwhelming, and the warmth unmistakable. These were close families. My friends respected their mothers, and I witnessed that same regard in the way their fathers treated them. That closeness extended beyond their households into a wider community, something I experienced firsthand while walking through the annual Arab Festival with them for consecutive summers during those years.
Without question, I am no expert on Muslim cultures, and a few friendships do not qualify me to pronounce on the entirety of Muslim family life. But neither am I obliged to dismiss those experiences in favor of sweeping assertions that Muslims are contemptuous of America, its culture, or Christians like me, or that Muslim men are inherently disrespectful of women. The caricature I am being asked to accept simply does not cohere with what I witnessed in the families who welcomed me so graciously into their homes, knowing full well that I was a Christian.
Later, during my police career, I worked alongside Muslim Americans who were generous, funny, kind, and devoted to their families. One enlisted in the American military after 9/11 and served two tours in the Middle Eastern conflicts that followed. He subsequently became a police officer and eventually my district partner.
I spent my last ten years on the job as a detective, and I am retired now. He remained on road patrol. Yet through all that time, to this very day, he still texts me every Christmas and Easter to offer blessings to me and my family on our Christian holy days.
Pure religious intolerance, right?
His military service should not be required to establish his belonging here. Nor should his thoughtfulness toward a Christian colleague be required. But when someone invokes 9/11 and terrorist extremes as the governing lens through which I ought to understand Muslim Americans, I think of the man who responded to that moment by serving this country, and who later worked beside me serving a community within it.
I think, too, of the Muslim neighbors I have had and the Muslim students I have taught. People with personalities, commitments, challenges, and hopes. Same as me, and my family. Their lives are no more honestly understood through the worst associations someone can attach to their religion than yours or mine would be.
These are Americans. Just as much as you or I are. It shouldn’t even need saying. Their belonging should be a settled point from which the conversation proceeds, rather than a concession they must earn from self-appointed “real” or “heritage” Americans.
DEARBORN, SHARIA, AND THE DEMAND TO ASSIMILATE
All this is also why I find the recent targeting of Dearborn on account of its substantial Muslim population so abhorrent.
In the months leading up to the election, outsiders portrayed the city as though its Muslim population made it hostile territory, and an imminent threat to the “American Way.” The pot-stirring fool Jake Lang brought his so-called “Christian Crusade” to a Dearborn City Council meeting, where he accused Muslims of seeking to “outbreed” white people and “steal our wealth.”[1] Whatever political concern someone might attempt to dress that up in, the racial and religious hostility is hardly concealed behind the trappings of Christian faith adorned by Lang and the gaggle of believers that came out in support of such hate-filled repugnance.
The Dearborn so often portrayed bears little resemblance to the community I have known and frequented. Even the insinuation of lawlessness runs into an inconvenient factual obstacle: according to figures released by the city, violent crime declined by 14 percent in 2025, following improvements the previous year.[2] No city is without problems. But a substantial Muslim population does not constitute evidence of civic deterioration anywhere in Southeast Michigan, be it Dearborn or other predominantly Muslim neighborhoods. That population has been substantial for generations. Still, Dearborn is comparatively safer than many jurisdictions in its particular region of the metroplex.
People who travel to a community looking for confrontation should not, then, be granted the authority to define it by the confrontation they help produce. Nor should commentary delivered from a comfortable distance automatically carry more weight than the testimony of people who actually live there, or in local proximity. I’m looking at you, out-of-state talking heads.
Area Christians offered precisely that testimony. Ahead of Lang’s August rally, Dearborn clergy publicly defended their Muslim neighbors and described a community in which people of different faiths live and worship together.[3] Pastors and a Catholic chaplain spoke from their experience of serving there, rather than from an imagined account of what Muslim neighbors must be like.
If the question is whether Christians can live freely in Dearborn, surely Christians who live there ought to have some standing in the conversation. There is something profoundly disordered about invoking Christ while insulting a community, then expecting those who know its people to mistake the hostility for courage. I have experienced these neighbors’ hospitality. I am unwilling to discard it because someone with a megaphone or a TV show insists that I should be afraid.
For my entire life, Muslim communities have been part of southeast Michigan. Across those 55 years, my encounters have included friendship, hospitality, public service, and the ordinary exchanges by which people come to know one another. While some local Muslims observe the precepts of sharia in their personal lives and worship, I have witnessed no effort to impose those precepts on the broader community through civic institutions. Yet now that El-Sayed is on the scene, the rhetoric often proceeds as though Muslim presence itself were the opening stage of a nationwide religious and cultural conquest.
Part of the difficulty here is that “sharia” often enters the conversation as though its meaning were both universally understood and universally threatening. Like “Marxism,” it is bandied about with ironic confidence by people whose certainty about its dangers far exceeds their understanding of what it actually means.
A distinction is worth making. Sharia refers to what Muslims understand as divine moral and religious guidance, grounded in the Quran. Fiqh is the human work of interpreting and applying that guidance. Those interpretations differ across schools, cultures, and historical circumstances. We are therefore not speaking of a single, universally accepted legal code that every Muslim holds to with the ambition of imposing it upon everyone else.
For many Muslims, following sharia finds everyday expression in prayer, fasting, charitable giving, dietary observance, and ethical conduct. Its historical scope also includes matters of law and government, so reducing it entirely to private spirituality would be misleading. But observing its religious obligations does not, by itself, establish a desire to make them binding upon non-Muslim neighbors. That distinction matters, particularly when ordinary religious practice is being presented as evidence of an approaching political takeover.
“They don’t want to assimilate,” we are told, as though preserving their religious and cultural identity were itself evidence of an ambition to take over and overthrow the “American Way.”
Here, however, I think we need to examine what the proposition actually means. If assimilation means participating in community life, working, raising families, and respecting the rights of others, the Muslims I know are doing those things. The wider place of Muslims in this region and how they have long engaged within it only serves to confirm that. If assimilation means abandoning their religion, language, and cultural inheritance to the point where the majority of non-Muslims no longer feels the perceived discomfort of their diversity, then we are making a considerably different demand. One that deserves to be stated honestly.
Here in southeast Michigan, for instance, we understand perfectly well that a family can preserve its Polish traditions, speak Polish at home, and worship in a Polish Catholic parish while being thoroughly American. We recognize a heritage being carried forward within a shared civic life. We understand the same of our Jewish and Hispanic communities: cultural and/or religious distinctiveness need not diminish American belonging.
Why, then, should Arabic, Muslim traditions, and attendance at a mosque imply something more sinister?
When comparable practices are celebrated as heritage in one community and offered as evidence of failed assimilation in another, we must ask what accounts for the distinction. Race and religion cannot simply be ruled out because those drawing the distinction resent the accusation or want to preserve the façade that their judgments are free of Islamophobia or racism. The discomfort at having one’s prejudice named does not make it disappear.
Consider it from the other direction. If circumstances led you to another country for safety or opportunity, would you understand your welcome to require abandoning Christianity? Would you stop speaking English with your family, celebrating Christmas, or passing cherished customs to your children?
Your answer is surely, “No.” As would be mine.
I suspect most of us would expect to participate faithfully in our new society while retaining the things that give our family life meaning. It should not be so difficult to extend that expectation to someone else.
WHEN SUSPICION BECOMES EVIDENCE
Next comes the warning about sharia, often delivered with a sort of gravity suggesting that electing one Muslim senator sets America on an inevitable course toward becoming Afghanistan or Iran. Before working through the aspects of that imagined catastrophe, I would like evidence that El-Sayed even intends it. His Muslim identity does not establish the premise. Without that evidence, the resulting argument is an elaborate response to something we have merely assumed.
Even the hypothetical overlooks the force of the elected office involved. He will be one senator among 100, serving in one chamber of a legislature within a constitutional system. He cannot unilaterally impose a religious legal order. Other lawmakers, a president, courts, and constitutional protections against the establishment of religion exist. If his proposals are objectionable, we can oppose them. If his conduct violates the public trust, we can hold him accountable. Electing him does not require surrendering the capacity to judge what he does moving ahead. We voted him in. We can vote him out.
But the campaign accusations (and those I continue to hear and read) go well beyond policy disagreement. Trump suggested that El-Sayed would need to pass through a metal detector to enter the Senate. Ted Cruz warned that giving him access to classified intelligence could enable him to share sensitive information with the Muslim Brotherhood. The insinuation was hardly subtle: an American seeking public office was to be regarded as a potential terrorist collaborator.
An accusation of that magnitude ought to require evidence of comparable substance.
And if national security is the concern, where is the consistency when Trump’s relationships with Russia enter the discussion?
At Helsinki in 2018, Trump publicly cast doubt on American intelligence findings about Russian election interference while entertaining Vladimir Putin’s denials.[4] This was something we could openly observe, involving an actual long-accepted foreign adversary. Donald Trump Jr. and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, also attended the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting expecting damaging information about Hillary Clinton believed to be originating with the Russian government. The meeting was arranged through an intermediary at the request of the son of a Russian billionaire developer, Aras Agalarov.[5]
Those facts do not establish that Trump or his relatives are Russian spies or pawns. The investigation did not establish that the campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference. Nevertheless, willingness to entertain purported assistance from that historically adversarial government warrants real scrutiny.
Why do some who dismiss those concerns appear so certain that El-Sayed would betray American secrets? How does speculation about a Muslim candidate’s loyalties become more compelling than documented choices by the family of a politician they support?
The Muslim Brotherhood allegations demand the same scrutiny. El-Sayed has denied membership and disavowed the organization. Perhaps not to your personal satisfaction, but isn’t that part of the undercurrent of this whole piece? At what point does dissatisfaction with his answer become an unwillingness to accept any answer he could give?
Look, I can agree that he could have been clearer and more forceful. But there is also reason to question how much of the controversy reflects genuine concern and how much reflects political expedience. Campaign attacks have drawn on old social media posts by his half-sister about their family and mother, along with his past comments about Egyptian politics. Those materials require examination in context. They do not establish that he belongs to the Brotherhood, much less that he intends to betray his country on its behalf. Disliking his denial of an allegation does not provide the evidence needed to substantiate it.
Precision also matters when discussing the organization itself. In January 2026, the administration designated the Lebanese branch a Foreign Terrorist Organization and imposed terrorism sanctions on the Egyptian and Jordanian branches. Those designations apply to specific organizations. They do not establish El-Sayed’s affiliation with any of them. Whatever political convenience those designations may offer his opponents, they supply no evidence about his conduct or the ulterior motives those opponents so confidently imagine.
Even a substantiated allegation about a relative would not establish that. We understand that adults are accountable for their own choices in most other circumstances. There’s no sound reason to suspend that rationale here.
WHOSE RELIGIOUS COERCION COUNTS?
The concern about religious government raises a further question: how consistently do we oppose the coercion we claim to fear?
When I raise Christian nationalism, I sometimes hear that it is nothing like radical Islam. Certainly, the traditions, histories, and methods differ. But those differences do not answer the moral question being raised: what makes the suppression of civil rights acceptable when its justification is grounded in a jingoistic ideology masquerading as Christianity?
In an NPR interview, Doug Wilson defended replacing individual voting rights with household voting and described a future Christian political order that would exclude non-Christians from public office. He also distinguished between acceptable church bells and unacceptable minarets in public life.[6] The resulting acceptable religious citizenship would be explicitly unequal … even outlawing some uniquely Catholic expressions of worship.
If we want to defend freedom of conscience and equal citizenship, we should oppose these proposals. The loss of a woman’s independent vote or a Muslim American’s eligibility for public office does not become less consequential because the person advocating it professes a certain type of Christianity. Apparently, for some of my fellow believers, religious coercion becomes considerably less troubling when it comes wearing the right denominational label.
Additionally, religiously motivated violence should not be understood as an exclusively Muslim phenomenon.
On September 28, 2025, a man drove his truck into a Latter-day Saints church in Grand Blanc Township, opened fire, and set the building ablaze. Four people were killed. The FBI subsequently identified hatred of the Mormon faith as the motive. Reporting also indicated that he displayed a Trump campaign sign at his home, and I recall a local source in which an evangelical pastor said the man had recently been attending his congregation.
Neither association establishes that his politics or evangelical affiliation motivated the attack, much less makes evangelical Trump supporters collectively responsible. But imagine how quickly a comparable association with Islam or the political left would become the centerpiece of the story. Apparently, collective guilt is an intolerably broad brush when applied to one’s own community, yet sound political and religious discernment when applied to someone else’s.
That atrocity did not emerge from the Muslim families so readily portrayed as a danger to southeast Michigan. Nor would I assign responsibility for it to the attacker’s neighbors or everyone who shared his background. Doing so would repeat the very failure of judgment I am challenging. The question is why that restraint becomes so difficult when the perpetrator is Muslim. Why does his violence so readily become evidence about an entire faith, while someone else’s remains an individual’s crime?
Our commitment to individual accountability should also govern the discussion of antisemitism.
Jewish Americans deserve safety, dignity, and full participation in public life. We must take threats against them seriously. Lord knows we have seen enough antisemitic hatred and violence. And as we have seen, Muslims certainly do not hold a monopoly on perpetrating it. We must also confront rhetoric that assigns collective guilt to Jews or excuses violence against them.
But criticism of the current Israeli government does not, by itself, constitute antisemitism. A politician can oppose its policies without advocating the persecution or marginalization of Jewish people. Particular statements may still warrant criticism, including when they cross that line. Again, the obligation is to examine what has actually been said and done.
Christians whose support for Israel rests on dispensationalist theology must make that distinction, too. Their esoteric understanding of Israel’s role in the end times belongs to a theological system developed in the early nineteenth century. However certain its adherents may be that their eschatological hopes are tied to Israel, they should not confuse that certainty with the consensus of two millennia of Christianity, which offers overwhelming testimony to the contrary.
We must resist the ad hoc dispensationalist hermeneutic that currently manifests itself in the insistence that unconditional support for an Israeli government is a Christian obligation. When every criticism is treated as opposition to God’s purposes, contested theology becomes, for some, a theological sanction for political allegiance and a shield against moral scrutiny. Apparently, a place in someone’s prophetic timetable comes with an exemption from accountability.
Many Christians, including many Protestants, do not share that framework. Their disagreement does not establish hostility toward Jewish people, any more than criticism of an Israeli administration does. Jewish people, in Israel and throughout the world, deserve the same love, dignity, and regard we owe every neighbor. None of that requires us to admire, defend, or excuse the conduct of the Israeli government. Governments answer for their actions. A people should not have to answer collectively for its government—and a government should not be protected from criticism by conflating itself with a people group.
Neither should these narrowly dispensationalist views be mistaken for the perspective of Jewish people themselves. Jewish voters are not of one mind about El-Sayed. One survey found that 57 percent of Michigan Jewish early voters supported him, while also documenting substantial concerns and divisions.[7] He received even higher shares of the overall vote in some heavily Jewish communities.[8] Support does not amount to blanket approval, and we should not casually dismiss the concerns of those who opposed him. But that opposition also cannot be presented as a collective Jewish repudiation of his candidacy. Both realities require us to listen to Jewish people in their diversity rather than presume to speak for them.
One thing is certain. Christians who cloak unconditional allegiance to the State of Israel in opposition to antisemitism do not get to pass off their convictions as the collective voice of Michigan’s Jewish voters.
With that said, suggesting that El-Sayed has never explicitly condemned antisemitism is either misinformed or misleading.[9] His public statements clearly establish otherwise. Whether one finds his broader response adequate is up for debate.[10] Pretending those condemnations do not exist, however, is not.
WHAT OUR FAITH REQUIRES OF US
Throughout these conversations, what troubles me is how easily suspicion assumes the high ground of knowledge. Once the threatening picture is accepted, almost anything can be projected onto it. A name, a relative, a religious affiliation, or a criticism of a foreign government becomes another confirmation of what was already presumed. And the person himself becomes increasingly difficult to see.
I cannot claim to know the private motives of everyone who opposes El-Sayed. There are legitimate reasons to disagree with his politics. But when an Arab Muslim’s election prompts insinuations about explosives, terrorist loyalties, and religious conquest without sufficient evidence, calling it political disagreement does not adequately account for what is happening.
Racial and religious prejudice must be considered.
For Christians, there is a further obligation here. The prohibition against false witness does not cease to matter when a damaging allegation proves politically useful. Nor does love of neighbor become optional when the neighbor’s faith and culture, for some reason, unsettles us.
In fact, it is precisely there that the substance of our professed convictions comes into view, before our culture. It is easy enough to affirm human dignity when the person before us is familiar, agreeable, and already understood to belong. The more challenging question is what happens when our inherited assumptions tell us otherwise. Are we willing to examine and potentially abandon those assumptions, or will we enlist our faith to defend them?
I do not need to agree with Islam to recognize a Muslim’s dignity. I do not need to endorse El-Sayed’s platform to reject accusations built upon his ancestry and religion. And remembering 9/11 does not oblige me to forget every Muslim whose life has given me reason to resist the caricature.
I remember Ahmed and Jay. I remember their mothers’ hospitality. I remember my partner’s service, and the Christmas and Easter messages that still arrive. I remember neighbors and students whose ordinary lives have become obscured beneath someone else’s extraordinary suspicions.
Those experiences do not make me incapable of recognizing extremism. They give me reason to insist that we distinguish it from the people who have neither embraced nor practiced it.
I haven’t forgotten 9/11.
I just haven’t forgotten my neighbors, either.
NOTES:
Tyler Scott, “Christian Nationalist Protest Led by Jan. 6 Rioter Stokes Tensions in Dearborn,” Michigan Advance, August 19, 2026, https://michiganadvance.com/2026/08/19/christian-nationalist-protest-led-by-jan-6-rioter-stokes-tensions-in-dearborn/.
City of Dearborn, “Dearborn Reports Significant Decline in Violent Crime, Highlights Public Safety Investments for Second Year in a Row,” February 10, 2026, https://dearborn.gov/index.php/es/node/7913.
Edith Pendell, “Dearborn Leaders Say City Remains Safe for All Faiths Ahead of Visit by Anti-Muslim Provocateur,” Michigan Public, August 18, 2026, https://www.michiganpublic.org/politics-government/
2026-08-18/dearborn-leaders-say-city-remains-safe-for-all-faiths-ahead-of-visit-by-anti-muslim-provocateur.
Eugene Kiely and Lori Robertson, “Trump’s Remarks on Putin and the Russia Investigation,” FactCheck.org, July 16, 2018, https://www.factcheck.org/2018/07/trumps-remarks-on-putin-and-the-russia-investigation/.
Robert S. Mueller III, Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, vol. I (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, March 2019), 110–115.
Leila Fadel, “Pastor Doug Wilson on Why He Believes the U.S. Should Be a Christian Theocracy,” Morning Edition, NPR, July 7, 2026. Minarets are the slender towers on a mosque from where the Call to Prayer is sounded.
The Jewish Majority, “2026 Survey of Michigan Voters,” November 3, 2026.
Jessica Piper and Lisa Kashinsky, “How Abdul El-Sayed Actually Did with Jewish Voters,” Politico, November 5, 2026, https://www.politico.com/news/2026/11/05/abdul-el-sayed-jewish-voters-interview-01152872.
Abdul El-Sayed, “Abdul El-Sayed Statement on West Bloomfield Synagogue Attack,” March 12, 2026, https://abdulforsenate.com/2026/03/abdul-el-sayed-statement-on-west-bloomfield-synagogue-attack/.
The Bulwark. “Interview with El-Sayed,” November 4, 2026. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZg_
JPB5sss. Specifically, 12:25 onward.
Comments