Former President George W. Bush told an audience in Dallas on Wednesday evening, September 9, 2026, that he went to a Washington mosque in the first days after the September 11, 2001, attacks because reports had reached him of Muslim women being harassed in public. The evening was held at his presidential library, where he joined members of his administration to revisit the attacks.
Bush, 80, appeared at “A Legacy of Service: America at the 25th Anniversary of 9/11,” taking the stage for a 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.”
Why He Went to the Mosque
Rice raised that trip herself. She asked Bush to describe the efforts he had made to assure Muslim American citizens that the attacks were not being laid at their feet.
Bush cast the stop as a test of the country’s own principles. An ideological struggle was how he described the fight, and the freedom to worship as one chooses was, in his telling, a central piece of American ideology that would be surrendered if it were given up.
“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.
His 2001 Message to the Country
Few parts of Bush’s response to the attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people, were as visible as that mosque visit. Six days afterward, on September 17, 2001, he traveled to the Islamic Center of Washington and declared, “Islam is peace.” Community leaders met with him there, and he raised how Muslim women in head coverings were being treated, relaying accounts he had heard of some who feared intimidation so much that they would not leave home or go shopping. “That should not and that will not stand in America,” he said at the time.
Those remarks, known variously as “Remarks at the Islamic Center of Washington” and “Islam Is Peace,” 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 tried that message before the mosque stop. Respect for Arab Americans and Muslim Americans was what he asked of the country when he talked with journalists on September 13, 2001. A day later, on September 14, a National Day of Prayer he had proclaimed, he spoke at a memorial service that also included Muzammil H. Siddiqi, a Muslim imam. Earlier that year, his first public comments about Islam as president had come in a statement marking Eid al-Adha — the first American presidential statement issued for the holiday.
Responses to the 2001 speech varied. Hate crimes against Muslims dropped in the period after the remarks, compared with the days immediately before them. Conservative Christians in some quarters criticized the administration 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. A positive speech was the verdict of sociologist Louise Cainkar, who nevertheless said Bush undercut it in other addresses that cast Muslims as hostile to America. Bush went back to the Islamic Center on June 27, 2007, speaking at its rededication ceremony.
The Days That Followed the Attacks
Speaking in Dallas on September 9, 2026, Bush also described what the attacks settled for his team. “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,” he said, adding, “Based upon a belief system.”
The conversation ranged well beyond the mosque visit. Bush walked the audience through the day of the attacks itself. “I was in a classroom listening to a little child read,” he said at the program hosted by the George W. Bush Presidential Center. The American public, he went on, rallied in the aftermath, and military recruitment and volunteering surged — a response he said he got to see firsthand.
Rice recounted those days as she had lived them inside the White House. Intelligence sharing between the FBI and the CIA had to be forged by the administration for the first time on the morning after the attacks, she said, because civil liberties concerns had kept the two agencies from really being able to talk to each other. 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; it swelled, she said, 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, a peak no president had reached in the history of polling. Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the attacks, eluded U.S. forces throughout 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 told the Dallas audience. Those Americans, he argued, never saw the sacrifice and courage of that time, and he pressed 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. Each of the 2,983 names on the 9/11 memorial wall was read aloud that morning, soft music playing behind the recitation. Family members took turns at the pulpit at Ground Zero, among them Daniella, daughter of victim Victor Wald, who said: “Daddy, wow, 25 years.”
