Asad Dandia was eight when he watched the Sept 11, 2001 attacks on television at his Pakistani-immigrant parents’ home in New York.
Then came the backlash — years of Islamophobia as Americans processed attacks that had killed nearly 3,000 people.
There was anger, suspicion and worse.
At 19, Dandia experienced a police informant posing as a friend to infiltrate his family home, part of a now-disgraced surveillance effort purportedly seeking to detect extremism.
Today, though, the 33-year-old historian finds a New York transformed: one with its first Muslim mayor, public prayers in Times Square and new mosques rising across the city.
