Word had reached former President George W. Bush that Muslim women were being harassed in public, and that, he said, was why he visited a Washington mosque in the first week after the September 11, 2001, attacks. He recounted the episode to an audience at his presidential center in Dallas on the evening of Wednesday, September 9, 2026.
The program, “A Legacy of Service: America at the 25th Anniversary of 9/11,” put Bush, 80, onstage for a conversation with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Al-Qaeda struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon while Rice held the post of national security adviser, and she became secretary of state in 2005.
“This decision, shortly thereafter, was to go to a mosque,” Bush said, recounting the mosque trip. “I did so because I was deeply concerned about stories of women in coverings being harassed at shopping centers, particularly in Michigan.”
Revisiting the Islamic Center Visit
That trip came up when Rice steered the discussion to it. She asked her former boss to explain the effort he had made to assure Muslim American citizens that no blame for the attacks was falling on them. Bush answered by framing the visit as a test of the country’s own principles.
The fight, he said, was an ideological struggle, and to give up the freedom to worship as one chooses would be to surrender 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.
What He Told the Country in 2001
That mosque stop became one of the most visible pieces of Bush’s answer to attacks that killed 2,977 people. Six days afterward, on September 17, he traveled to the Islamic Center of Washington and declared, “Islam is peace.” Meeting there with Muslim community leaders, he raised the treatment of Muslim women who wore head coverings. Reports had reached him, he said, of women who would not step outside their own doors or run errands at the shops 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 separated the hijackers from 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.
It was not the first time he had delivered that message. Respect for Arab Americans and Muslim Americans was what he called on his fellow citizens to show when he spoke with journalists on September 13. The next day, at a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance service he had proclaimed, he spoke at Washington National Cathedral alongside Muzammil H. Siddiqi, a Muslim imam. Some conservative Christians criticized the administration afterward for drawing a line between Islam broadly and terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda. Bush went back to the Islamic Center on June 27, 2007, to speak at its rededication.
Inside the Days After the Attacks
“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 said at the Dallas program. “Based upon a belief system.”
The conversation ranged well beyond the mosque visit. Bush recalled the day of the attacks itself — “I was in a classroom listening to a little child read,” he said — before turning to how the public rallied. Military recruitment and volunteering both surged, he said, a response he got to see firsthand.
Rice’s account of those days came from inside the White House. Intelligence sharing between the FBI and the CIA had to be forged for the first time on the morning after the attacks, she said, since civil liberties concerns had left the two agencies unable to really talk to each other. Robert Mueller, then the FBI director, and George Tenet, then the CIA director, came into the Oval Office every morning to show the president the threat matrix, and that document, she said, swelled to the size of a phonebook between September 10 and September 12.
Bush’s standing with the public climbed in the weeks after the attacks to a 90 percent approval rating, the highest Gallup has ever recorded for a president. Osama bin Laden, who masterminded the attacks, stayed beyond the reach of U.S. forces for the rest of Bush’s presidency, and 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. Those Americans, he argued, never saw the sacrifice and courage of that time, and he pressed the case for keeping the history alive. Two days after the Dallas program, on the morning of Friday, September 11, Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush joined the anniversary ceremony at Ground Zero in New York City. All 2,983 names on the memorial were read aloud to soft music — the 2,977 killed in the 2001 attacks and the six killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Among the readers was Daniella Wald, daughter of 9/11 victim Victor Wald, who addressed her father from the pulpit. “Daddy, wow, 25 years,” she said. “Sometimes it feels like a lifetime ago and others just yesterday.” Her family, she told him, had done what he would have wanted. “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.”