Quarter-century after 9/11, Europe’s Muslims still bear cost

By MNTV Staff

When hijacked planes struck New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, the consequences did not stop at America’s borders. 

A quarter-century on, as the world marks the anniversary, Europe’s Muslims — now around 26 million people, the European Union’s second-largest religious group — are still living with the fallout: a climate of suspicion that hardened into law, policing, and daily discrimination, and which, by the evidence of the continent’s own monitoring bodies, has grown worse rather than eased.

Suspicion that became structural

In the months after the attacks, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) — the EU body since replaced by the Fundamental Rights Agency — commissioned the first pan-European study of the backlash. 

Its “Summary Report on Islamophobia in the EU after 11 September 2001” documented a wave of verbal abuse, attacks on mosques, and assaults on visibly Muslim people, especially women in headscarves, across member states.

Crucially, scholars analyzing that report argued 9/11 had made Islamophobia more socially acceptable, lending prejudice a “newer and possibly more prevalent” respectability, as the academic Chris Allen wrote in a study drawing on the EUMC findings.

Researchers describe what followed as a shift in the very nature of the prejudice. Evidence submitted to the U.K. Parliament characterized post-9/11 Islamophobia as a “new” racism — a move “from race to religion,” in which Muslim men were cast as “folk devils” embodying terrorism and Muslim women as symbols of oppression. It also became, in that analysis, a “racism of surveillance,” in which cultural and religious difference was treated as a security threat to be monitored.

Measured toll

The clearest picture comes from the EU’s own data. 

In October 2024, the Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) published “Being Muslim in the EU,” based on a survey across 13 member states. 

It found that 47 percent of Muslims had experienced racial discrimination in the previous five years — a sharp rise from 39 percent in a comparable 2016 survey — with the highest rates in Austria (71 percent over five years), Germany (68 percent), and Finland (63 percent). Discrimination was worst in the job and housing markets, and among those stopped by police, half believed it was because of their ethnic or immigrant background.

National monitoring points the same way. 

The European Islamophobia Report 2024, an annual academic survey, cited the FRA figures alongside record anti-Muslim incident tallies, noting that Muslim women in religious dress face the highest exclusion. 

In Germany, official figures recorded more than 1,500 anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2024, including dozens of attacks on mosques; the U.K. monitoring group Tell MAMA logged its highest number of anti-Muslim incidents since it began tracking. 

The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation’s annual Islamophobia report identified the U.K., France, and Germany as the continent’s principal hotspots, driven by a resurgent far right.

Policing, veil, and law

The security logic of the “war on terror” reshaped how European states treat Muslim communities. Amnesty International, in a 2022 briefing to the Council of Europe, warned that counterterrorism measures had “cultivated a generalized suspicion of Muslims” and eroded rights across education, employment, and housing, with a disproportionate impact on women. 

In France, successive governments have closed mosques, Muslim schools, and associations under counter-extremism powers, and expanded restrictions on the veil — a pattern of bans on the hijab and abaya in schools that the European Islamophobia Report notes has spread to Italy, Denmark, and, most recently, Austria, where a ban on the headscarf for girls under 14 took effect in September 2026.

The Council of Europe’s own anti-racism commission, ECRI, warned as early as 2004 that the fight against terrorism had left Muslims and those perceived as Muslim “particularly vulnerable to racism” across public life — a warning that, two decades later, the data suggest went largely unheeded.

Unfinished reckoning

Successive reports converge on a single conclusion: the anniversary of 9/11 is not, for Europe’s Muslims, a closed chapter of history but a live condition.

Rights bodies including the FRA, the European Parliament, and ECRI have all pressed governments to formally recognize anti-Muslim racism in their national anti-racism plans, to review counterterrorism frameworks that disproportionately target Muslims, and to protect freedom of expression — including, the European Islamophobia Report stresses, the growing suppression of speech since the genocide in Gaza, which monitors say has triggered a fresh surge in anti-Muslim incidents.

Twenty-five years after the attacks, the reckoning the reports call for remains unfinished. 

For millions of European Muslims, the legacy of that day is measured not in memorials but in job applications refused, mosques defaced, headscarves legislated against, and the persistent experience — as the FRA data attest — of being treated as suspect in the countries they call home.