The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, changed the course of Sahar Aziz’s career.
Before the planes crashed and the buildings collapsed, she’d planned to finish law school and move to the Middle East to do pro-democracy work. After, she still wanted to be a lawyer, but she set her sights on civil rights work much closer to home.
For Aziz and many other Muslims, 9/11 was a wake-up call about not just the fragility of life, but also the fragility of America’s constitutional protections. In the months and years after the terrorist attacks, government officials and everyday citizens constrained the rights of their Muslim neighbors, using national security concerns to justify surveillance, profiling and discrimination.
As a result, Muslims often feel like second-class citizens, Aziz said earlier this month during a virtual panel on the Muslim experience after 9/11. They question America’s promise of religious freedom for all.
— Read the full article published on September 4, 2021 on Deseret News here.
