Mobeen Azhar: '25 years after 9/11, British Muslims are still living with its fallout'

I love my job and the perspective it affords. But when we began production of my new BBC documentary Being Muslim After 9/11, I had an overriding sense of dread.

Filmmaker Masood Khan and I have documented the experiences of Muslim communities in Britain for many years. I am acutely aware of how anxious many Muslims are about life in Britain today.

I was a student in Leeds when news of September 11, 2001, broke. It felt like the entire world stopped to process the magnitude of the horror.

I dropped in at a friend’s house and his first words were: “Have you seen what your lot have done?” The friend was not Muslim. The ‘lot’ he was referring to was the Muslim community that I am part of.

In that one sentence, a precedent was set. Many people began to see the world through a tribal lens. In one camp, the civilised world. In the other, Muslims, who were increasingly being characterised as backward, violent and dangerous.

A lot of people felt this sentiment was being echoed when President Bush made his speech declaring: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

At the time, many people saw this take as reductive. Making this film confirmed what I felt in my bones: the clash-of-civilisations idea has stuck. There is a direct line between the events of 2001 and the political climate today.

The American- and British-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were events that informed my politics and shaped my life. I was working at a tiny local newspaper as a student when geopolitics cemented my mission to become a journalist and cover the stories that I care about.

In my first years working in television, having Muslim heritage gave me a specialism. The fluffy films I made about Ramadan were soon outnumbered by access pieces about violent extremism.

I spent years interviewing convicted terrorists in the UK, Lebanon and Pakistan. I was even shot at by the Taliban while reporting for Panorama.

While filming Being Muslim After 9/11, I met my friend Imam Alyas Karmani. I first got to know him as a contributor in one of my early films. He is a psychologist and long-standing practitioner in counter-radicalisation.

I asked him why so many of my former interviewees seemed reluctant to speak to me in 2026.

“They see you as part of the establishment. You need to take some responsibility. Why didn’t we see the reasoned voices? All we saw were these extreme caricatures. We would be shouting at the TV all the time. It was like WWE.”

I believe that no story is off limits, and British audiences had every right to content that explored the motivations of those who advocated violence in the name of religion.

But did the press, of which I am part, give extremists like Anjem Choudary a disproportionate platform? Did we do enough to inform audiences that his views were at odds with the overwhelming majority of Britain’s Muslim communities, and the wider Muslim world too?

Fast-forward to today, and Choudary is behind bars for terror-related offences after years of appearances on mainstream outlets. The impact of extremist ideas is all around us. Research published by the British Muslim Trust shows more than 70 attacks on Mosques in the UK over a 12-month period, an average of around one every five days. The incidents included vandalism, intimidation, violence, harassment, hate speech and online abuse.

Many Muslims in Britain live not only with a heightened awareness of the risks to their safety, but also with a feeling that their opinions and even their presence in public life are not welcome.

Baroness Warsi, who served as the first Muslim woman in Cabinet, told me: “This is far worse than I anticipated it would be when I first entered politics. It started off, ‘Muslims are not the problem, it’s just these little violent ones over here.’”

She concludes that the prevailing logic today has shifted to: “It’s Islam, full stop.”

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Marrying a road-trip format with an attempt to answer monumental questions about a community that I’m part of was a creative risk. Convention dictates that certain criteria must be met, including a watchable dynamic between those making the trip, some drama en route and a reason to be cheerful at the end.

We certainly met the first two.

From speaking to those Masood and I met along the way, I believe many of Britain’s Muslim communities are living with the collective trauma of what happened 25 years ago and of how that informs the way they are treated today. That in itself is a valuable foundation on which to build, if we choose, as a society, to move forward.

Being Muslim After 9/11 is available now on BBC iPlayer and airs at 9pm on BBC Two on Monday 12 October.

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