It’s been 25 years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, and during this time Muslim Americans have learned how to live in that dangerous space between other Americans’ fears and their ignorance.

The fear was clear from the beginning. Immediately following 9/11, Muslim Americans faced what Human Rights Watch called “a severe wave of backlash violence”. A tide of hate rose up against ordinary Muslims and those who appeared to be Muslim, including at least three murders in the immediate backlash after the attacks. The federal government, for its part, began targeting Muslim immigrants in a massive surge of repression that legal experts soon compared with the Palmer Raids of the 1920s.

The ignorance was just as evident. Even Oprah Winfrey did her part to allay it, dedicating an episode of her show in October 2001 to “Islam 101”. The Qur’an leapt on to the New York Times bestseller list that fall. Yet despite these early efforts at education, most Americans still learned little about Islam and Muslims. One 2006 study found that only a third of those polled realized that Muslims worship the same God as Christians and Jews do. Close to 10% of respondents thought Muslims worship a “moon god”.

Much of this fear and ignorance has continued unevenly over the last quarter century, with negative attitudes towards Muslim Americans softening at times and hardening, sometimes into deadly violence, at other times. What’s interesting is when expressions of these attitudes happen. It turns out that predicting when animosity to Muslims will rise and fall may not be quite what you think.

Researchers who study Islamophobia discovered several years ago that anti-Muslim outbreaks in the United States don’t follow highly publicized acts of terrorism. Rather, Islamophobic incidents tend to cluster more routinely around our election cycles. That’s what the New American Foundation found in 2018. That’s what the researcher Dalia Mogahed discovered earlier. And that’s partly what the Brookings Institute’s Shibley Telhami was referencing when he wrote, in 2024, that there was “strong suggestive evidence” that presidential messaging and crisis rhetoric can considerably sway American public attitudes toward Muslims.

Islamophobia, in other words, is better understood not as an irrational fear of a religious other but rather as an increasingly instrumentalized part of our politics, one that is most often activated around our elections. (Needless to say, when Islamophobia is deployed, it’s at the expense of the American Muslim community’s wellbeing.) And since we’re also closing in on a fiercely contested midterm election season, we should take note of the sky-high levels of Islamophobic rhetoric we’re witnessing today from the (mostly Republican) politician class.

Consider Laura Loomer, the far-right activist and Donald Trump’s close confidante. “Ban Muslims from holding office in America,” she posted on Twitter/X in July. Then there’s the South Carolina representative Nancy Mace, who wrote: “Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic. We refuse to be silent.” The Florida representative Randy Fine, who has called for the deportation of the New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, believes: “We need more Islamophobia, not less. Fear of Islam is rational.” And the senator Tommy Tuberville recently stated: “Michigan Democrats just voted to send a TERRORIST to the Senate. Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed is a RADICAL ISLAMIST who will do everything he can to destroy America.” In a thinly veiled Islamophobic comment, JD Vance recently said: “There’s something about Abdul El-Sayed that is very, very evil. And on the rise in the United States of America today.”

In Texas, the levels of Islamophobia are now stratospheric. Lone Star politicians loudly trumpet anti-Muslim messages and repeatedly introduce versions of anti-Muslim legislation, seeking to forbid everything from Sharia courts, which don’t actually exist in Texas, to real estate developments by Muslims. Must be election season.

The Texas governor Greg Abbot, who is up for re-election, has designated the country’s largest Muslim civil rights organization, the Council on American Islamic Relations (Cair), a foreign terrorist organization. This is ludicrous, of course, but as a Muslim organization, Cair’s an easy mark. As the Knight First Amendment Institute points out, “the domestic targeting of dissent starts with groups that those in power deem to be attractive political targets, but it never ends there. Without further opposition to these orders, CAIR is likely only the first of many groups to be in the crosshairs of politically motivated governors.”

And that’s the larger point. Muslim Americans have been weathering these kinds of attacks for decades now, but what we also know is that attacks on Muslims won’t end as attacks on Muslims. For 25 years, we have known what it means to live under a national security state. We have known what warrantless surveillance feels like. We have known what politicized immigration enforcement looks like (remember the Muslim ban?). We have known what it means when our dissenting voices are silenced, especially when advocating for Palestine.

And so, we recognize when those same tools are used by the National Security Agency to spy on ordinary Americans (as revealed by the whistleblower Edward Snowden) or when today’s mass deportations carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement resemble the immigration crackdown on Muslim immigrants decades earlier. Republicans worry loudly about their made-up fantasy of “creeping sharia”, but what all of us should really be concerned about is the reality of this creeping authoritarianism.

Muslim Americans have hardly been silent when facing this repression. Instead, we’ve organized ourselves to oppose it. If the political culture of the United States is poised to deny us our legitimate rights, then the response must be preserving those rights for everybody, not just for Muslim Americans.

That’s exactly what we’re witnessing today. Muslim Americans are more present in the American political scene than ever before. According to a recent study, a record 255 Muslims now serve in elected positions across the country, including 11 mayors, 18 judges and four members of the US House of Representatives. Muslim women account for more than 43% of the total.

The New York mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed are probably today’s most visible Muslim American politicians. What makes them noteworthy is not just their obvious communication skills, but their deliberate attention to policies that enhance the public good for all.

El-Sayed, for example, prioritizes universal access to healthcare and clean water, eliminating medical debt, and banning corporate money in politics. Mamdani, for his part, has delivered a pilot program delivering taxpayer-funded childcare for two-year olds, a rent-freeze on rent-stabilized apartments, and a parents’ night out program, where children spend supervised time at city recreation centers so parents can have time for themselves. These Muslim politicians have discovered a simple, timeless truth: Democracy’s best defense is ensuring that everyone lives well.

For the last 25 years, a bevy of political forces have routinely mobilized fear and ignorance against Muslim Americans to peddle the fiction that Muslims will take over the country. Their message has always been that Muslim Americans don’t belong in the United States.

But you know what? We’re paying less attention to them by the hour. Muslim Americans have too much work to do preserving our democracy. The truth is that, while the Islamophobes waste everyone’s time with the ludicrous charge that Muslims and Americans are irreconcilably different, Muslim Americans are just too busy making a difference. For everyone’s sake.

• Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and a Guardian US columnist