What Does It Mean to Feel Safe? How Islamophobia Affects Muslim Mental Health
“Is Osama bin Laden your uncle?”
A student asked me this on the day of my fifth-grade graduation. I remember the question because of how casually it was asked - and because, by then, I had already begun learning that being perceived as Muslim could make me a target.
My awareness of this began months before my family immigrated to the United States. On September 11, 2001, I was living in Pakistan. It was like any other day, I remember following my usual routine and playing with my sister. My mom seemed caught up with watching the news on repeat. “Something bad happened,” she began, before explaining the attacks on the World Trade Center. I felt shocked and confused. Why would anyone do that?
As the days progressed I recall her worry for my dad. News coverage and political commentary increasingly associated the attacks with Muslims, and my father was living in the United States, where our family planned to immigrate. During brief phone calls across a nine-hour time difference, he told her that Muslims were being targeted and surveilled. I was trying to understand both the horror of the attacks and why our identity suddenly seemed to place my father in danger.
A few months later, we immigrated to the United States. I had pushed my mother's fears to the back of my mind. Like many immigrant children, I was both nervous and excited about a new life and new opportunities. Moving to the United States felt like a dream.
I started school mid-way through the spring semester. When I was introduced to my class as the new kid from Pakistan, I quickly became aware of how different I was perceived to be - a familiar experience for many Muslims living in the West.
It was not long before the anti-Muslim comments began. Students asked me why Muslims were so violent. Then came the question at my fifth-grade graduation. The comments continued into high school. In an Advanced Placement World History class, I sat in a breakout group discussing why the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was supposedly necessary. One classmate told me that her father believed Muslims were a threat to democracy and that the United States therefore had the right to invade them.
Did I tell her that I was Muslim? Did I challenge what she said?
No. I hid the parts of myself that might identify me as Muslim.
During a formative stage of my life, I was not only learning a new country. I was learning which parts of my Muslim identity felt safe to reveal. I was also learning that safety was not limited to protection from physical violence. It could depend on how others perceived my identity, whether I remained silent, and how successfully I could convince people that I was not a threat.
Safety is Foundational to Mental Health
Safety is essential to mental and physical health. When the brain detects a threat, it activates a physiological stress response that prepares the body to protect itself. In the short term, this response is necessary. But when the stress system remains activated over time, it can interfere with sleep, concentration, digestion, mood, immune functioning, and cardiovascular health (National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development).
A prolonged expectation of judgment, exclusion, hostility, or danger, which many Muslims experience, can keep the mind and body alert. even when an immediate threat is not visible. For Muslims who repeatedly encounter discrimination or messages portraying them as dangerous, vigilance may reflect not only an internal anxiety response but also an effort to navigate patterns of real harm.
Safety isn’t limited to protection from physical violence. It can include feeling emotionally secure in relationships, knowing trust that one’s cultural or religious identity will not be demeaned, trusting institutions that shape daily life, and being able to speak up, grieve out loud, or engage in public life without fear of retaliation. For many Muslims, safety can also be impacted by whether belonging is freely given, or if it is conditional on appearing harmless, agreeable, or politically silent.
Safety is a central principle of trauma-informed care. A trauma-informed approach considers what a person has experienced, how those experiences continue to affect them, and how safety, trust, power, identity, collaboration, and choice shape treatment (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration). It asks not only what is happening inside an individual but also what has happened around them - within their family, community, institutions, and broader environment.
When Muslims in the West challenge anti-Muslim hate, they may be told, “If you don't like it here, go back to your country.” That response ignores the reality that many Muslims were born in the United States or have built their lives, raised their children, served their communities, and contributed meaningfully here. It also overlooks the painful contradiction faced by many who cannot return to their ancestral homelands because they have been destabilized by wars, foreign intervention, or policies supported by the country they now call home.
The burden of creating safety is then placed on the individual while the systems undermining that safety remain unnamed and unaccountable. This is not a politically neutral process. U.S. surveillance, military intervention, immigration policy, school curricula, and public narratives about Muslims all shape who is treated as threatening and whose fear is treated as legitimate. What does it mean to ask someone to feel safe when the conditions contributing to their fear are produced by institutions with far more power than any individual client?
Islamophobia Before and After 9/11
Islamophobia did not begin on September 11, 2001. Moustafa Bayoumi, a writer and professor at City University of New York, has extensively examined Islamophobia, surveillance, and Arab and Muslim American life. Bayoumi traces the origins of modern institutionalized Islamophobia to the rise of anti-Palestinian racism after the 1967 Arab–Israeli War. His argument reverses a commonly assumed relationship: anti-Palestinian hate did not merely emerge after 9/11, it helped develop surveillance practices and political narratives that were later expanded through the War on Terror (Bayoumi, 2024). After 9/11, Muslims, Arabs, South Asians, Sikhs, and others perceived to be Muslim faced heightened scrutiny, profiling, surveillance, discrimination, and hate.
The War on Terror also inflicted enormous human costs abroad. Brown University's Costs of War project estimates that more than 940,000 people were killed in Muslim-majority countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan in the two years following 9/11. An additional estimated 3.6-3.8 million lost their lives indirectly due to the collapse of economies, healthcare systems, infrastructure and the environment in areas targeted in the name of the Global War on Terror (Brown University Costs of War, 2025).
The harm has not remained in the past. Since October 2023, Palestinians have endured what Amnesty International and a United Nations Commission of Inquiry have concluded is genocide by Israel in Gaza (Amnesty International, 2024; United Nations Commission of Inquiry, 2025). The mental-health consequences also extend across borders. After October 2023, Naseeha Naseeha Mental Health reported a 600% rise in crisis calls from Muslims who were experiencing anxiety and marginalization in their schools and workplaces in relation to Gaza (Naseeha Mental Health, 2023). These are a reminder that when atrocities occur across the SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) region, it affects not only those who inhabit that land, it also affects countless others globally.
Islamophobia, Anti-Arab Racism, and Anti-Palestinian Racism
Anti-Palestinian racism is not the same as Islamophobia. Muslims are not a monolith, and many Arabs and Palestinians are not Muslim. Palestinians include Muslims, Christians, and people with diverse relationships to religion. Anti-Palestinian racism targets Palestinian identity, history, political expression, and advocacy for Palestinian rights. Anti-Arab racism treats Arabs as foreign, violent, or threatening. Islamophobia targets Muslims and people perceived to be Muslim through religious and racialized narratives of danger. These forms of oppression have distinct histories, even as they overlap and reinforce one another.
That overlap affects people beyond those who identify as Muslim, including Sikhs, Arabs, South Asians, and people connected to Southwest Asia and North Africa, or SWANA. It also shapes institutional practices and U.S. policy at home and abroad. In February 2026, joined Israel in attacking Iran, beginning the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war against Iran (Reuters, 2026). The psychological effects of these policies and wars do not stop at national borders.
Collective and Diaspora Grief
For many Muslim and SWANA people I work with, facing anti-Muslim hostility at home while witnessing Israel's genocide in Gaza, the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, and other state violence against family members or communities abroad is a source of profound distress. These are not abstract geopolitical events. They can activate grief shaped by colonization, displacement, war, and diaspora across generations. For people connected to the region through ancestry, culture, faith, language, family, or shared identity, the effects can feel deeply personal and destabilizing.
People often explain feeling helpless watching from afar, experiencing survivors' guilt, fear for their loved ones, and experiencing hypervigilance while getting news updates. Although they may not physically be in a war zone, their bodies can react to images of people with shared identities being injured, displaced, or killed. Grief may intensify when U.S. institutions help fund the violence while workplaces, schools, media, or even therapists expect Muslims to discuss its consequences in depoliticized language. Beneath these experiences is a painful question: If the United States does not feel safe for us, where do we go when U.S. policy is also helping make our ancestral homelands unsafe?
I am reminded of a question Natalie Gutierrez asks in her book, The Pain We Carry, “how can I feel safe in a country that doesn’t want me, or that continuously makes me feel physically and emotionally unsafe?” (Gutiérrez, 2022).
When Islamophobia Enters the Classroom
In 2011, the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, or ISPU, published a report that found increasing cases of “discrimination, bullying, and exclusion of Muslim students in schools” after 9/11, and raised concerns that curricula and teachers might be negatively biased in how Islam was being taught in schools (ISPU, 2011).
In 2026, the Texas State Board of Education adopted revised high-school social studies standards requiring students to learn that “radical Islam” motivated the 9/11 attacks. Another proposed standard described early Islamic history through “the Prophet Mohammed's military campaigns against Jewish and Christian tribes, the normalization of slavery, and the taking of female captives as harem slaves.” Muslim Texans and several board-appointed experts challenged the historical accuracy and framing of these provisions. One expert cautioned that the characterization did not “hold up to close historical scrutiny” (Texas Tribune, 2026; adopted standards).
Fifteen-year-old Habiiba Quresh asked the board not to teach Islam primarily through terrorism, violence, and conquest. Her testimony highlighted what is at stake when Muslim students repeatedly encounter their religion through the language of threat: the message can extend beyond the textbook and shape how classmates, educators, and institutions perceive them.
Recent ISPU data underscores this vulnerability. In 2022, 48% of Muslim families with children in K-12 schools reported that a child had experienced religious-based bullying during the previous year, compared with 18% of families in the general public. Among Muslim families reporting bullying, 42% said a teacher or school official had been involved (ISPU).
Some parents respond by encouraging their children to make their Muslim identity less visible. That response may be protective in an environment parents perceive as unsafe. But when Islam is labeled as “foreign” or “dangerous” it does not remain confined to the pages of textbooks. It has real world consequences for the well-being and safety of Muslim students who are not only marginalized, but are also at a vulnerable age. They can contribute to shame, isolation, self-monitoring, bullying, and pressure on Muslim students to defend an entire faith tradition while they are still developing their own identities.
Conditional Safety
Political theorist Mahmood Mamdani described how post-9/11 discourse divided Muslims into political categories of “good” and “bad.” In this framework, being accepted was tied to being secular, westernized, or modern (Mamdani, 2022).
Many of us learned to monitor how we speak, soften your anger, overachieve, appear patriotic and perform to be one of the “good ones”. These strategies may have helped us find safety or belonging. But when anti-Muslim hate continues across schools, workplaces, media, and politics, the pressure to perform “goodness” and “safety” can remain.
This may look like:
Being extra polite or agreeable
Feeling unable to make ordinary mistakes
Hiding anger to avoid confirming stereotypes
Monitoring one's words, tone, clothing, or emotions
Overachieving to demonstrate worth or acceptability
Distancing oneself from Muslims perceived as “too religious” or “too political”
Remaining silent when Muslims are dehumanized because speaking feels too risky
One study found that post-9/11 climate ranging from “telling nobody” about aspects of identity to policing the behavior of other Muslims to avoid drawing negative attention to the community (Sirin & Fine, 2007).
My own experience of being a Muslim student in the US included microaggressions about the way I spoke or how my name sounded to outright racial slurs, stereotypes, and discrimination. Over time, I learned to survive by staying quiet, keeping my head down, and trying not to “ruffle any feathers.” Silence became a survival skill.
As I grew older, I realized that this wasn’t just something I experienced individually. I saw similar patterns across many South Asian, SWANA, and Muslim communities. Silence may be used to keep the peace, preserve relationships, avoid backlash, or survive difficult circumstances. Family dynamics and histories of colonization, displacement, war, migration, and sacrifice can interact with anti-Muslim discrimination to shape people-pleasing, perfectionism, self-monitoring, and difficulty expressing anger.
Reality is that over-proving cannot control other people’s prejudice. You do not have to be the perfect Muslim, the perfect American, or the perfect representative of your community to deserve acceptance and respect.
Coping, Faith, Agency & Culturally Responsive Therapy
I receive inquiries from Muslims seeking therapy who describe having to spend sessions explaining their faith and culture, performing for a therapist because they fear representing Islam “badly,” or being asked to challenge their thinking about discrimination before the therapist has adequately explored whether the threat is real. These experiences can make the therapy room feel like another place where safety and belonging must be earned.
Many dominant Western models of mental-health care emphasize individual symptoms and coping while obscuring the systems that produce distress.
Anxiety may be treated primarily as distorted thinking, sacred rage or morally grounded rage may be reduced to an anger management problem, and grief about violence abroad may be treated as something that needs containment rather than a human response to organized violence. But when distress is connected to structural discrimination, state violence, surveillance, and war, an exclusively individual approach does more than fall short: it risks locating the problem inside the person harmed instead of naming the institutions causing harm.
How are we supposed to ask people to simply feel safe when the conditions making them feel unsafe are real and ongoing?
Coping skills and therapy can provide meaningful support, but coping cannot be our only response to structural discrimination. We cannot place the entire responsibility on marginalized people to psychologically adapt to environments that continue to harm them.
Research suggests that leaning into faith and cultural identity can actually protect against the harm caused by discrimination Muslims may experience (Abu-Raiya et al., 2011). For some Muslims, supportive practices may include:
Engaging in prayer, dua, Quran reading, or other faith-based practices
Seeking connection with people who understand their religious or cultural context
Participating in Ramadan, Eid, mosque life, or other communal traditions
Resting and regulating the body without treating rest as indifference
Joining advocacy, mutual-aid, educational, or civic efforts when doing so feels meaningful and sustainable
Accountability cannot be placed on Muslims alone. Individual coping is not meant to make oppression easier for Muslims to tolerate. Doing so reinforces the messages that anti-Muslim hate is too big too tackle and that there is not much that can be done. This inadvertently creates hopeless and helplessness within many Muslims, stripping them of their agency. Advocacy can offer agency, connection, and shared purpose, but privilege shapes who can act publicly with relative safety and who is exposed to greater risk. This must be taken into account when deciding which ways one can show up.
For readers looking for places to begin:
Emgage USA educates and mobilizes Muslim American voters and offers opportunities for civic participation.
Emgage Action advocates for policies affecting Muslim communities and human rights.
CAIR provides civil-rights advocacy and channels for reporting discrimination.
ISPU produces research and data about American Muslims that can support education, advocacy, and institutional change.
Dismanteling anti-Muslim hate requires collective action, whether that is done by directly engaging with organizations or caring for people whose advocacy work carries a heavy emotional load. It is not meant to happen overnight or by one individual's actions.
Advocating for the systemic change that addresses Anti-Muslim hate can be protective for us individually, for our communities, and for other marginalized communities. Humans are social creatures, we need each other to survive and feel safe. When we come together to support one marginalized group, it has the ability to create safety for others.
Safety Should Not Have to Be Earned
Safety is not the absence of immediate physical harm. It includes being able to grieve, speak, practice, and exist without having to prove that one is harmless or “good” in order to belong in their own country. Creating this safety is not an individual endeavor. As a nation, it requires extending the promise of liberty and justice to Muslims in practice, not only in principle.
Muslim mental health care has to hold individual, historical, institutional, and global contexts together. Culturally responsive therapy can provide a space where you feel understood without spending each session explaining or defending your faith and culture. It can help you explore people-pleasing, perfectionism, overfunctioning, identity, grief, anxiety, anger, and belonging without asking you to abandon the relationships or traditions that matter to you. It can also make room for grieving atrocities in your community while examining the privileges and contradictions that may come with living in the West.
I provide culturally responsive, trauma-informed telehealth therapy for Muslim, South Asian, and SWANA adults living in Texas. If you are looking for a therapeutic space where your faith, culture, identity, and wider social context can be part of the conversation, schedule a consultation.
References
Abu-Raiya, H., Pargament, K. I., & Mahoney, A. (2011). Examining coping methods with stressful interpersonal events experienced by Muslims living in the United States following the 9/11 attacks. Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 3(1), 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0020034
Bayoumi, M. (2024, May 23). Decades of spying and repression: The anti-Palestinian origins of American Islamophobia. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/23/israel-gaza-war-islamophobia
Britto, P. R. (2011). Global battleground or school playground: The bullying of America's Muslim children. Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. https://ispu.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/2011_ISPU_Policy_Brief__49_Britto_WEB-1.pdf
Brown University Costs of War. (2023). How death outlives war: The reverberating impact of the post-9/11 wars on human health. https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/costs/human/civilians-killed-and-displaced
Brown University Costs of War. (2025). U.S. military aid and arms transfers to Israel, October 2023-September 2025. https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/paper/AidToIsrael
Council on American-Islamic Relations. (2024, April 2). New CAIR civil rights report reveals highest number of complaints in group's 30-year history. https://www.cair.com/press_releases/new-cair-civil-rights-report-reveals-highest-number-of-complaints-in-groups-30-year-history/
Gutiérrez, N. Y. (2022). The pain we carry: Healing from complex PTSD for people of color. New Harbinger Publications.
Naseeha Mental Health. (2023, November 14). Naseeha Mental Health reports alarming 600% increase in helpline calls regarding the ongoing conflict in Gaza-Israel. https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/naseeha-mental-health-reports-alarming-600-increase-in-helpline-calls-regarding-the-ongoing-conflict-in-gaza-israel-802610509.html
Amnesty International. (2024, December 5). Amnesty International investigation concludes Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/amnesty-international-concludes-israel-is-committing-genocide-against-palestinians-in-gaza/
United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel. (2025, September 16). Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN Commission finds. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds
Reuters. (2026, September 12). No signed Hormuz deal expected yet from Oman meeting on Monday, Iranian official says. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/no-signed-hormuz-deal-expected-yet-oman-meeting-monday-iranian-official-says-2026-09-12/
Sirin, S. R., & Fine, M. (2007). Hyphenated selves: Muslim American youth negotiating identities on the fault lines of global conflict. Applied Developmental Science, 11(3), 151-163. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888690701454658