Former President George W. Bush told an audience at his presidential center in Dallas on Wednesday evening, September 9, 2026, that he walked into a Washington mosque during the first week after the September 11, 2001, attacks because word had reached him that Muslim women were being harassed in public.
Bush, 80, appeared at “A Legacy of Service: America at the 25th Anniversary of 9/11” for an onstage conversation with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Rice held the job of national security adviser when al-Qaeda struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and she became secretary of state in 2005.
“This decision, shortly thereafter, was to go to a mosque,” Bush said, describing the decision. “I did so because I was deeply concerned about stories of women in coverings being harassed at shopping centers, particularly in Michigan.”
Looking Back at the Mosque Visit
Rice turned the conversation to that trip. She asked the former president to describe his effort to convince Muslim American citizens that no blame for the attacks was falling on them, and Bush walked the audience through it.
Bush cast the visit as a test of the country’s own principles. The fight, he said, was an ideological struggle, and abandoning the freedom to worship as one chooses would mean surrendering a central piece of American ideology.
“I also made it clear that Islam was a religion of peace, not a religion of war, and that these people subverted their religion,” he added.
The Message He Delivered in 2001
That stop at the mosque became one of the most visible pieces of the response Bush mounted to attacks that killed 2,977 people. He traveled to the Islamic Center of Washington six days afterward, on September 17, and declared, “Islam is peace.” Standing with Muslim community leaders, he raised what was happening to women in head coverings; reports had reached him, he said, of some who would not leave home or shop because they feared intimidation. “That should not and that will not stand in America,” he said at the time.
Known variously as “Remarks at the Islamic Center of Washington” and “Islam Is Peace,” the address drew a hard line between the hijackers and the faith they claimed. Terrorism, he told the country, was a perversion of the faith by men who claimed it, not the face of the religion itself. He praised the contributions Muslim Americans make to national life, and he quoted a passage from the Quran during the remarks.
He had reached for that message before. Respect for Arab Americans and Muslim Americans was what he asked of his countrymen when reporters questioned him on September 13. He spoke the following day at a memorial service held on a National Day of Prayer he had proclaimed; a Muslim imam, Muzammil H. Siddiqi, also took part at Washington National Cathedral. Not everyone welcomed the framing. Some conservative Christians faulted the administration for distinguishing between Islam broadly and terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda. On June 27, 2007, Bush went back to the Islamic Center to speak at its rededication ceremony.
Inside the Days After the Attacks
The Dallas conversation ranged well past the mosque visit. Bush walked through the day of the attacks itself and the way the American public rallied in the aftermath. Military recruitment and volunteering jumped, he said, and he had watched that happen up close.
“9/11 was a clarifying moment for me and you and others in our administration because we realized that we were vulnerable to attack based upon what we believe,” Bush told the Dallas audience, adding, “Based upon a belief system.”
Rice gave her own account from inside the White House. Civil liberties concerns, she said, had left the FBI and the CIA unable to really talk to each other, so the administration had to forge intelligence sharing between the two agencies for the first time on the morning after the attacks. Robert Mueller, then the FBI director, and George Tenet, then the CIA director, brought the threat matrix into the Oval Office every morning to show the president; between September 10 and September 12, she said, that document swelled to the size of a phonebook.
The public lifted Bush’s standing in the weeks after the attacks to a 90 percent approval rating, the highest figure Gallup has ever recorded for a president. Osama bin Laden, who masterminded the attacks, eluded American forces for the rest of Bush’s presidency; a Navy SEAL team killed him in Pakistan in 2011.
Reading the Names at Ground Zero
“The sad thing is one-third of our nation has no clue what we’re talking about,” Bush said in Dallas, arguing that those Americans never saw the sacrifice and courage of that time and pressing the case for keeping the history alive.
Two days later, a ceremony marking the anniversary in New York City drew Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush, along with Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Readers at Ground Zero spoke aloud each of the 2,983 names on the memorial as soft music played — the 2,977 killed on that Tuesday in 2001, plus six people who died in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Daniella Wald, whose father, Victor Wald, was among the dead, spoke to him directly from the pulpit. “Daddy, wow, 25 years,” she said. “Sometimes it feels like a lifetime ago and others just yesterday.” Then she told him how the family had carried on: “Yes, we’re leading meaningful lives, but not a day goes by that mom, Alex and I don’t think of you, love you and miss you dearly.”