One of Zaid Fouzi’s earliest childhood memories is from a family picnic in Ohio. He was four years old.A man approached his mother, who wears a hijab, and said: “I’ll never forget 9/11. I’ll never forget what you people did.”A verbal altercation with his father, laden with expletives, followed. Mr Fouzi and his older brother watched, stunned and frightened.It was a year after the September 11 attacks of 2001, which killed nearly 3,000 people and had a profound and lasting impact on the US and the world — including on Muslim and Arab Americans.Mr Fouzi, now 29 and a Syrian-American comedian, says that incident and others like it became life for Muslims growing up in the aftermath of 9/11.Community members gather at the Islamic Centre of San Diego, California, on May 19, the day after a shooting there killed three people. The two teenage gunmen later shot themselves. Middle East Images via AFPShow caption: Community members gather at the Islamic Centre of San Diego,…“For me, growing up post-9/11 made me feel very protective of my identity,” he said. “I just always wore it like a badge of honour.”A quarter of a century after the attacks, Muslim and Arab Americans say the discrimination and suspicion they endured have also instilled a determination to carve out their own place in American society.To do so, they have challenged bias, fought discrimination, protested against surveillance and opposed accusations that they are not sufficiently American.In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, FBI data showed a sharp rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes. The backlash also exposed the profoundly ignorant nature of prejudice: one of the first people killed in a post-9/11 hate crime was Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh American who was shot outside his Arizona petrol station days after the attacks.Muslim Americans who came of age after 9/11 have often found themselves having to educate others about their faith and defend their identities.“You were essentially forced to be an ambassador to Islam, which forced you to learn more about it and be more articulate about what Islam says about a given issue,” said Youssef Chouhoud, an assistant professor at Christopher Newport University, who studies Muslim Americans.He says that experience helped to produce a generation that is more conscious of its identity and more confident in asserting it — including through political participation.Play00:35Muslim US Senate candidate mocks Trump over nameMr Chouhoud said Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s first Muslim Mayor, and Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee from Michigan for the US Senate, were examples of a generation seeking greater political involvement and an expanded role in shaping American society.Still, negative perceptions persist.A Pew Research Centre survey conducted in May found that 43 per cent of US adults said Muslims are less patriotic than other Americans, while 42 per cent said Muslim Americans have a negative effect on the country.Last month, far-right activist Jake Lang led a “Christian Crusade” demonstration in Dearborn, Michigan, home to the largest concentration of Arab Americans in the US.Mr Lang, alongside hundreds of supporters, denounced what they called the “Great Replacement” of Christians and warned of the spread of “Sharia law”. He later ripped up pages of the Quran.Patriot ActAfter the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Virginia, the US government swiftly expanded its counter-terrorism and security apparatus.Just 45 days after the attacks, Congress passed the Patriot Act, significantly increasing the government’s surveillance and law-enforcement powers in terrorism and national security investigations.Although several key provisions expired in March 2020, civil liberties groups say the law’s legacy has endured, including its effect on Muslim Americans, who were subjected to disproportionate surveillance and scrutiny.The effects, critics say, extend beyond the law itself.Sumayyah Waheed, senior policy counsel at Muslim Advocates, a Washington-based civil rights organisation, says the Patriot Act and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security were measures that increased government power in the name of national security.Supporters gather at Daley Plaza for the fifth Annual Palestinian Flag-Raising Ceremony in Chicago, Illinois, on May 16. Anadolu via AFPShow caption: Supporters gather at Daley Plaza for the fifth Annual Palest…Ms Waheed says those choices helped to establish a framework that has since been used in new ways, including during the political response to protests over Israel’s war in Gaza.“We can see with the [US President Donald] Trump administration how all of those choices paved the way for the abuses we’re seeing now,” she said.“This is the same playbook, but just used in a much broader, unsubtle, typical Trump way, where everyone can see that it’s an abuse of power, that it is not what we hold as our ideals as Americans.”Observers also note that Islamophobia has evolved over the years, and has kept up with the political climate.“Islamophobia was ushered in to create the Patriot Act, which was then used to surveil and spy on Muslim Americans, Arab Americans and mosques,” said Abdelhalim Abdelrahman, a Palestinian-American writer.“But now you’re seeing Islamophobia, and the aftermath of the security apparatus of post-9/11, being used to stifle criticism of Israel and its genocide of Palestinians, and that’s being used not just against Arabs and Muslims, but against everybody."Israel's war in Gaza that started in 2023 prompted a massive student movement on campuses, with protesters calling for an end to US military support and for their universities to sever ties with Israel. In 2024, under the administration of president Joe Biden, law enforcement and universities cracked down on pro-Palestinian student protests. Hundreds of students were arrested and some charged with crimes. The following year, the Trump administration increased the response, using immigration authorities to detain student activists, including Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts University doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk. Mr Khalil, a US permanent resident of Palestinian decent, was detained over his involvement campus protests, while Ms Ozturk, a Turkish student, was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement after co-writing an opinion piece urging Tufts to reconsider its ties to Israel.Samraa Luqman hands out fliers outside the American Muslim Society Mosque to ask voters not to vote for Joe Biden, in Dearborn Heights, Michigan in February 2024. AFPShow caption: Samraa Luqman hands out fliers outside the American Muslim S…The administration said it was acting against anti-Semitism and activities it considered supportive of Hamas. Civil liberties groups said their detentions were violations of free speech.Abed Ayoub, former executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, says the years immediately after 9/11 were a crash course in advocacy, civil rights and political engagement for many Muslim and Arab Americans."Those lessons really haven’t stopped since then," he says, "and the community has grown exponentially because of 9/11 and everything that followed."Before 9/11, Mr Ayoub says, many Arab Americans were primarily “business-focused”, and less likely to discuss their heritage publicly or engage politically. Most voted for the Republican Party. The younger generation of Muslim Americans, he says, are increasingly putting their identities at the centre of their political work, and are engaged across all issues.He talks of Dearborn, the Arab-American city where Abdullah Hammoud was elected mayor in 2021, Rashida Tlaib’s election to Congress in 2018 as the first Palestinian-American woman to serve in the House, and Mr Mamdani’s election last year as examples of the community’s growing – and shifting – political presence.Many of the candidates have denounced the war in Gaza, describing it as a genocide, criticised Mr Trump’s immigration policies and advocated for universal health care.Mr Ayoub sees 9/11 and the war in Gaza as defining milestones for successive generations.“If you’re going to bookend things, on one end you’ve got 9/11, and on the other end you have the genocide,” Mr Ayoub said. “And those are the two bookends of how our community – when they tell our story 20, 30, 40 years from now, those time periods will be what shaped us.”