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. “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 nearly 3,000 people. He traveled to the Islamic Center of Washington six days afterward, on September 17, 2001, 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. The attackers had perverted Islam, Bush told the country, and terrorism did not represent the religion’s true face. 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, 2001. He spoke the following day, September 14, at a memorial service held on a National Day of Prayer he had proclaimed; a Muslim imam, Muzammil H. Siddiqi, also took part. A statement marking Eid al-Adha, issued earlier that year, carried his first public comments about Islam as president — and stood as the first American presidential statement issued for the holiday.
Reaction to the 2001 speech split. Hate crimes committed against Muslims fell afterward, compared with the days immediately before the remarks. The administration drew criticism from some conservative Christians for distinguishing between Islam broadly and terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda. Sociologist Rosemarie Skaine read the speech as evidence that Bush generally helped reduce Islamophobia in the United States. Another sociologist, Louise Cainkar, called it a positive speech but said Bush undercut it in other addresses that cast Muslims as hostile to America. 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 audience at his presidential library, 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, a peak no president had reached in the history of polling. U.S. forces never caught Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the attacks, during Bush’s presidency; U.S. special forces killed him in 2011.
“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. A ceremony marking the anniversary in New York City on Friday, September 11, 2026, drew Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush. At that 25th-anniversary observance at Ground Zero, readers spoke aloud each of the 2,983 names on the 9/11 memorial wall as soft music played. Daniella, daughter of victim Victor Wald, said from the pulpit: “Daddy, wow, 25 years.”