How Growing Up in New York After 9/11 Shaped These Muslim Leaders

“I watched the generation that was silenced and then I watch a new generation coming up now that is fearless,” one activist said.

A few days after Sept. 11, Shahana Hanif organized a meeting with her sisters and neighborhood friends in the basement of her home to draft a letter to President George W. Bush. Even though she was only 10 years old, she was already concerned about the shifting public opinions toward Muslim Americans. “One of the first questions we asked each other was, ‘Can the president help us?’” said Ms. Hanif, who was born and raised in Kensington, Brooklyn, the home of many Bangladeshi American families like her own. “The president was the most powerful person who could send this mass message to the American people that this incident happened and it shouldn’t reflect how we think about Muslims across America.” Mr. Bush did not write back. And in the following decade, few local leaders spoke out against the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk policy, which enabled profiling and discrimination, or what many perceived to be the department’s surveillance of Muslims, which only became public knowledge in 2011, or the wave of deportations enacted by the newly formed Department of Homeland Security.