Opinions

‘Please Don’t Let It Be a Muslim’: The Collective Prayer After Every Attack

BYKhaoula Ghanem

September 15, 2025

Did you hear that? That was the sigh of collective relief from Muslims all over the world after it was revealed that Charlie Kirk’s assassin wasn’t a brown person.

Last week, the conservative activist was shot and killed during an event at Utah Valley University. For more than a day, the country waited for a name and a face. When authorities identified the suspect as Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old white man now in custody, many Muslims felt not relief in any celebratory sense (someone had been murdered) but relief in the narrow, defensive sense: this tragedy would not instantly metastasize into suspicion, surveillance, and slurs against them.

Utah Governor Spencer Cox, visibly emotional, said he had prayed the suspect “wouldn’t be one of us.” The phrasing grew into its own controversy—who counts as “us,” and why does the nation habitually parse horror through tribal belonging? Regardless of Cox’s intent, the line laid bare the anxious calculus many communities perform when a shooter is still unnamed. For Muslims, that calculus is exhaustedly familiar.

@boredbedouin ♬ Hallelujah – Classical Sound Effect – Power Sound Effects

Why do Muslims brace like this? Partly because of what happens when the perpetrator is Muslim, or merely perceived as such. The social and political machinery built since 2001 has normalized a presumption of collective guilt and the media ecosystem amplifies it. A widely cited study in Justice Quarterly found that attacks by Muslim perpetrators receive, on average, 357% more news coverage in the U.S. than comparable attacks by non-Muslims. That disproportion doesn’t invent fear, but it curates it, rendering “Muslim violence” hypervisible while other patterns blend into statistical background.

The downstream effects are measurable. Hate crimes targeting Muslims surged to post-9/11 highs in the mid-2010s—rising 67% in 2015 alone—amid a climate where Islam was routinely framed as uniquely prone to violence. Even when the numbers ebb and flow, the muscle memory remains: when a blast or shooting hits the news, Muslim communities rush to secure mosques, cancel events, and rehearse talking points no other faith group is expected to deliver.

And it isn’t only Muslims who feel the brunt of it. Sikhs, Hindus, Arab Christians, and immigrants with “brown” features have often been swept up in the backlash, targeted simply because they look Muslim to someone primed by decades of media caricature. After 9/11, Sikh men in turbans became some of the earliest victims of retaliatory hate crimes in the U.S.

This anxiety also persists because the empirical picture of violence in the U.S. rarely matches the popular script. The most comprehensive datasets on public mass shootings show perpetrators are overwhelmingly men (about 98%); a slight majority are white; and the ideological spectrum of domestic terrorism is dominated in recent years by incidents tied to the far right—not by Islamist motivations. None of this denies that Islamist violence exists or that it is horrific when it happens; it simply situates it. But the calibration problem—what risks we fear vs. what risks we should fear—has consequences for who gets profiled, policed, and punished in the aftermath of any given atrocity.

And the consequences don’t stop at U.S. borders. America’s dominance in global media means its framing of Muslims as presumptive suspects has become a worldwide export. The War on Terror was not just military, it was narrative. The “Muslim terrorist” archetype that saturated American television, Hollywood, and newswire feeds seeped into European tabloids, Indian political campaigns, and even Chinese state rhetoric about Uyghurs.

Take the UK: studies by Cardiff University have shown that over a third of newspaper stories about Muslims link them to terrorism. Britain’s Prevent strategy, which disproportionately targets Muslim students and professionals, grew directly from the U.S. Homeland Security playbook. In France, the rhetoric of “radicalization” has been stretched so broadly that it polices everything from halal menus to hijabs.

Or consider India, where the ruling BJP has tapped into post-9/11 Western Islamophobia to bolster its “jihadi” caricatures of Indian Muslims. In 2020, when COVID-19 spread after a gathering at a Muslim seminary, Indian television channels amplified the phrase “Corona Jihad”—a framing that found quick traction partly because global media had, for decades, trained audiences to associate Muslims with disease-like threat.

Even in China, the internment and “re-education” of Uyghur Muslims has been justified through the imported vocabulary of counterterrorism. The U.S. global “terror” narrative gave cover to Beijing’s mass surveillance and “Strike Hard” campaigns, cloaking persecution in the language of security.

There is also the intimate, psychological ledger. Moustafa Bayoumi, whose work has mapped the texture of Muslim American life after 9/11, distills a persistent question: “How does it feel to be a problem?” The question wasn’t born in 2001, but the War on Terror made it something Muslims carry into airport security lines, job interviews, and ordinary news alerts. Scholar Maha Hilal captures the same condition with a cut of phrasing many Muslims recognize viscerally: innocent until proven Muslim.

It’s worth noting that newsrooms don’t coordinate a conspiracy, but chase what audiences have been trained to click. But when “Muslim terror” predictably eclipses other forms of violence, it hardens a shortcut in the public mind. It’s no wonder Muslim readers—who know this cycle—watch early coverage with clenched teeth. A rumor, a miscaptioned photo, an overeager “analysis” can do weeks’ worth of damage before a corrections box quietly appears. We saw that dynamic in the foggy hours after Kirk’s killing, when misidentifications and AI-fueled misinformation pulsed through feeds even as officials pleaded for patience.

To say Muslims breathed a guarded sigh when the suspect turned out to be white is not to claim moral high ground. It’s to narrate a defensive relief. Perhaps we can grieve without apology this time. That relief is valid because the alternative is predictable. After attacks by self-identified Muslims, mosques install panic buttons; civil rights groups brace for harassment hotlines to light up; students and hijab-wearing women are warned to vary their commutes; and pundits roll out the evergreen segment: “Where are the Muslim condemnations?” (Never mind that they flood the record every time.) The expectation of collective contrition—rarely applied to other groups—wears people down.

Muslims’ dread is juridical, bureaucratic, and backed by two decades of emergency that never ended. Hilal and others argue that this permanence is precisely the problem: a policy and cultural posture that can’t imagine Muslims as ordinary citizens without first vetting them as potential threats.

When Gov. Cox said he prayed the shooter “wouldn’t be one of us,” he voiced something deeply human. No community wants to claim a murderer. But his phrasing also illuminated why Muslims’ relief is legible, not shameful. In the first hours after violence, identity is treated like shrapnel—who gets cut by the blast radius of blame? Muslims know they often will, even when they had nothing to do with the crime. For once, they were spared that particular wound.

‘Please Don’t Let It Be a Muslim’: The Collective Prayer After Every Attack

Suggestions

Articles

Topics

‘Please Don’t Let It Be a Muslim’: The Collective Prayer After Every Attack

Related Stories

More From Opinions

Suggestions

Articles

Topics

Newsletter

The only newsletter you won't unsubscribe from

Follow Us