When 9/11 happened, I felt angry because I was born in New York, so I felt like someone was attacking my home. I’ve always had that sense of identity, regardless of my faith, because I was American first. I had cousins in the military, so I had this idea growing up that I’m going to be in the military one day. My dad was waiting tables. My mother was cleaning hotel rooms for a living. We needed the money, so it also felt like a quick and easy way to be able to help my family.

After I enlisted, there was a staff sergeant in my platoon who always questioned me about my allegiances. I wasn’t sure if he was joking or not. He’d say, “Are you really Muslim? Are you Hindu? Where’s your family from?”

There’s a lot of conservative ideology among the military. When they talk about wars, and shooting Afghans and Iraqis, they would talk about them in a disgusting manner. I’m thinking, “How can they even say that when I’m here as a Muslim? I’m, like, right next to them.” They didn’t think of me as an outsider because I was with them. But when they looked at other Muslims who weren’t in the U.S. military or who were not American, quote unquote, they treated them as if they were just dirt.

In 2015 a picture of me blew up on social media because Trump had said something about the Khan family. My cousin had posted this picture of me and my cousins in military attire as if to say, “We, as Muslims, are proud Americans, and we served our country.” I remember seeing people I served with saying blatantly disrespectful things about Muslims, that Trump was right about the Muslim ban. They were disregarding that I’m someone that served. It sucked. I never would have expected that from them. Here I am, signing up to fight for my country, but even when I do that, even when I try to wear the American flag on my uniform, it still wasn’t enough.

I was young enough that 9/11 itself was a confusing day, but in the immediate years following, it became important to me as a young believer to be visibly Muslim in a show of solidarity with my faith community. When I was in middle school, I decided to wear hijab.

Later I started to have a lot of questions, and I remember that I wasn’t finding answers to those questions. People ask me, “When did you choose to leave the faith?” Which is an interesting phrasing because belief is not a matter of choice. You either do or you don’t. There was just a point where it fell apart in my mind. I thought, “I guess I can’t call myself a Muslim anymore.”

As ex-Muslims, we have the problem of being perceived as Muslim. We face the anti-Muslim bigotry that Muslims face. But we also have an inability to talk about our negative experiences of the faith. There’s a lot of people who seem to think that now is not the right time. To them I say, “When will we be able to talk?” If it is the case that Islam has a specific problem with fundamentalism at the moment, people like us are part of the cohort pushing back against fundamentalism. And it’s pretty heartless to say, “Islamophobia is a thing, so your problem” — being forced into marriage or being abused — “is not a relevant fight for the moment.” I’m not going to wait on anyone’s permission to start speaking up about the things that need to be discussed.

It’s politicized, so it is much harder on the left. It’s easier on the right. But I’m not on the right.

Growing up, I identified as African American. I didn’t want to identify as a Somali or a Muslim. Nowadays, kids are more comfortable claiming their identity because there are so many people like them around. Back then, my mind as a child was thinking, “I need to blend in. I shouldn’t stand out.” My parents hated it. People would say things like, “When you talk, it sounds like you’re rapping.” So I thought, “Let me just play this role.”

Before 9/11, there wasn’t really much emphasis in the community about holding on to your Islamic identity. After 9/11, the religion was being attacked left and right. I became friends with a convert. This guy was the most religious person I’ve ever seen in my life. He used to tutor me because I was failing math. He didn’t memorize the Quran — he actually understood it. He showed me you could be a successful practicing Muslim.

I moved to Minnesota in 2013. The older Somali generation, they don’t understand how complex the situation is for African Americans. All they see is crime rates. They don’t see the story behind it. The youth that knew the situation, we were already supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement. After the George Floyd incident happened, even the elders came on and decided to support it. They know that if they don’t support it, the people that will be affected most are their grandchildren. A cop isn’t going to look at you and say, “Oh, this is a Somali.” At the end of the day, what happened to Floyd could happen to any of us.

Eldina Whenever people would ask me, “Oh, what religion are you?” I knew to lie. I would change the subject or avoid it completely. But I think I had an easier time than my older sister. She has darker features. Her name is Esada, and people used to call her Esada bin Laden.

Esada Even to this day, when someone says “Osama,” I literally cringe. My dad worked on the 102nd floor of the World Trade Center. When 9/11 happened, it was surreal. I was like, “That’s where Dad works.” Finally we got hold of him. I remember him coming home covered in gray ash.

When kids would say stuff like, “Oh, your family did the twin towers. It was your family that attacked the U.S.” I’d say, “My dad was in the towers. Why would I attack my family?” But I never defended the religion the way I should have. Being in middle school, I didn’t know enough.

Eldina We have a little sister. In her Spanish class one day, they were eating something with pork in it, and she wasn’t eating it. One of the students was like, “Why aren’t you eating it?” And she said, “I’m Muslim.” I freaked out on my sister. We had not talked about it up to that point, but when that happened, I said, “This is the end. Now everyone is going to know!”

Esada My mom never said not to tell people. We just didn’t.

Eldina I went to college right after high school and was interacting with lots of different types of people and even other Muslim students. That was formative for me. Around the same time, I told someone else, and they completely forgot. For me, it was such a big moment, but for her, it was as if I told her I grew up in New Jersey and she forgot the state.

In my hometown, I always felt like it was the biggest part of my identity. Like, once I’m this, I’m nothing else to people. If I saw people from my high school now, I would tell them, “You know what? Screw you if you don’t like me because of it.” I have a different mentality.

My family comes from a very rural part of South Yemen called Yafa. Every year, my father would take us back for summers, and I even lived there for about three years. My dad always had a sense of paranoia. He’d always tell me, “Any day that something happens between Arabs and America, you might have to go back home. So you have to know your way around.”

Right after 9/11, there was a kid who called me Osama, and I got into a fight with him. The following year, I went to Yemen, and I asked my dad, “They always call me ‘the American,’ ‘al Amreeki,’ and when I’m in America, they’re always pointing me out as Arab. Which one am I?” I didn’t know, being in elementary school, that I was having an identity crisis.

Sept. 11 vocalized anti-American sentiment in the Middle East. In Yemen, people supported the terrorists, saying, “America had it coming.” But I also kept hearing, “We want to go to the U.S. if we can.” It was very confusing at the time for me. I didn’t know if I should feel privileged or ashamed.

When I was in Yemen, I would see American drones buzzing in the sky far away, surveying the land. And every now and then, you would hear a drone strike. I was in the same region of Yemen as Anwar al-Awlaki when he was killed in 2011. If something were to happen to me in Yemen by an American drone strike, it would just be a day’s news. I don’t really think I have any special protection being an American.

I was born and raised in Saudi Arabia. My spirituality wasn’t conscious back home. My exposure to Islam was pushed in the U.S., especially when the 9/11 conversation comes up. I’m like, “I’ve got to pull my boots up and know what I’m talking about.” It comes up with my mom’s family because they’re Christian. They would ask me questions. They would try to convert me and say it’s because of 9/11. I didn’t even know that Muslims died there until I went to the memorial and looked up their names.

I heard stories about women getting their hijab ripped off, made fun of, people saying, “You don’t belong here. Get out of this country.” It’s like secondary trauma, where you didn’t experience it but you hear it so often that you feel like you did.

There have only been two times I’ve wanted to take off my hijab. The first time, I was going through some really tough times and heartbreak. The second time was 2016, when Trump was elected. It was as if 9/11 happened again, and for four years. I was sleeping a lot. I was isolated. I was like, “I should take off my hijab.” I didn’t feel safe. I just felt very visible those four years.

I’ve had clients who I can tell — with their eyes, how they look — what possibly they’re thinking. When I was a nursing assistant, I came into a room and greeted a patient. The first thing that came out of her mouth was, “Are you a terrorist?” I could tell the way she asked me, she was actually being genuine.

I still feel misunderstood, but I don’t let that dominate my mind. People are going to think what they think. There’s only so much you can do.

Islam was a counterculture for me. It was anti-normie. Other people my age became hipsters or anarchists. I became much more of a believing Muslim. I started wearing long thobes, the Arab dress, with the kaffiyeh. On a casual day, I’d wear that going to class.

Around the same time, I co-founded a charity with some local friends. We distributed food to the homeless and delivered groceries to underserved families. In March 2012, a young man messaged me to get involved. I met him at Friday prayers, introduced him to my circle. We prayed together. We shed tears together. In October, I got a text saying I need to check Facebook. The first thing I see is a confession from this young man saying, “I was an informant sent by the N.Y.P.D. to investigate terrorism.” Days after, the local mosque asked me to stop raising money there. They were afraid. People grew distant from me. Eventually, I met up with attorneys. They said they were recruiting a bunch of other Muslims in the community who had been impacted by police surveillance.

We reached a settlement in late 2016, and it became policy in late 2017. Some of the demands were that the N.Y.P.D. can no longer initiate investigations where race, religion or ethnicity are substantial or motivating factors.

Was it Toni Morrison who said racism is a waste of time? You could be producing so much, but instead you have to spend so much of your time dealing with this. That’s a question I ask myself: If 9/11 didn’t happen or if Islamophobia wasn’t so pervasive in the years following it, what could have my career trajectory been? Would my art and my writing and my religious practice and my friend circles revolve around these events? I can only speculate.