Muslims in the greater New Orleans area are worried about increased discrimination following the New Year’s Day attack on Bourbon Street that killed 14 people and injured dozens more.
Law enforcement officials have said the perpetrator of the attack, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, an American citizen and military veteran from Texas, claimed allegiance to the Islamic State terrorist group in videos posted to social media in the hours leading up to the attack. A day after the attack, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said in an Instagram caption that the state “does not cower to radical islamic terrorists.” And there has been an increase in anti-Muslim sentiment nationally since the attack.
There are around 24,000 Muslims in Louisiana and 6,000 in Orleans Parish alone, according to estimates from the Association of Religion Data Archives, with thriving communities on both banks of Jefferson Parish.
The New Orleans Police Department said it has not heard of any threats against the mosques in the area and that no one has requested extra security. The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office did not respond in time for publication. Still, several Muslims who spoke with Verite News for this story worry that language falsely conflating Islam with terrorism will spark retaliatory violence against their communities, as such rhetoric did in the aftermath of 9/11.
Laith Shalabi, a Gretna native who now studies in New York, voiced frustration with the media and political focus on the perpetrator’s religious identity. Shalabi flew back to New Orleans on Jan. 1, the day of the attack, and said he is worried about attacks against his community.
“He was just one rogue actor, and no one wanted to focus on the fact that he was a U.S. [military] veteran who had several other issues,” Shalabi said.
Masjid Omar, one of the largest mosques in the area, asked on Jan. 1 that residents not bring their children to play on the grounds directly following the attack to prevent harm to the community. In the same post, the mosque advised community members, especially women, “to take heed and be careful.” Mosque officials lifted the precautionary measures on Jan. 6, according to Mahmoud Sarmini, a board member at Masjid Omar.
Sabrine Mohamad, a human rights attorney who lives in Harvey, said these measures have made it more difficult for the community to grieve, as the precautions prevented them from gathering and talking to each other. She said the community was “devastated.”
“It’s very much [like the] post-9/11 climate right now,” Mohamad said. “Women who wear hijab are afraid of being out in public in the city. People are just really scared.”
Mohamad worked with Masjid Omar board members to organize a seminar called “Responding to Islamophobia” on Tuesday (Jan. 7) to help people navigate their sadness and fear in the aftermath of the attack.
“In the wake of the attack, while you’re hit with all these emotions of shock and disbelief, you are just like overcome immediately with the fear of what’s about to happen to you and your family and those who are visibly Muslim, or that people perceive to be Muslim,” Mohamad said in an interview.
Hate crimes against Muslims across the country spiked after 9/11 and again in 2016, according to Pew Research Center’s analysis of FBI statistics. In 2023, The Council on American-Islamic Relations reported that it received more than 2,000 complaints of anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian bias in the 57 days following Oct. 7 — a significant increase from the previous year.
“Some people react blindly, and some people cannot distinguish between a practicing Muslim and between people who are nominal Muslims, who claim to be Muslims and do terrible things in the name of their religion,” Sarmini said. “We have those in any religion.”
Gaby Smith, who attends a different mosque in Kenner, said she is scared that the attack will lead to negative perceptions of Muslim people. Smith, who wears the hijab, said she was called “a terrorist and a Nazi” by a stranger in August during a stroll through Audubon Park.
But Smith said she hadn’t noticed increased police presence at the mosque she attends. Although she said the Muslim community sometimes needs security, she doesn’t think police are effective at helping marginalized people. Instead, Smith and others said they were worried about increased surveillance from law enforcement — another vestige from the post-9/11 era, when mosques and ethnic communities were spied on in the name of national security.
Shalabi also opposes increased policing. He said that Muslims are “othered” in America, and held to double standards that force them to condemn and apologize for attacks that have nothing to do with them.
“We mourn just like everyone else in Louisiana mourns in that we suffered a loss, and there are people from our community that also suffered,” Shalabi said.
Among the victims was 18-year-old Kareem Badawi, a Muslim and Palestinian American from Baton Rouge. Shalabi, who is also Palestinian, said it was “shameful” that major news sources did not include Badawi’s religious or ethnic identity when identifying him along with other victims. People interviewed by Verite News said that Muslims, too, are members of the community and were victims of the attack.
For many Palestinians in the area, New Year’s Day became a time for mourning for lives lost both in the U.S. and abroad.
“When all those people died in New Orleans, there were also about four times the amount of people who had died at the same time in Gaza, and nobody brought it up, right?”
Mohamad said. “And that’s not to diminish the loss that we felt here, because every single one of us in the Muslim community felt every single one of those losses here, but at the same time, our people are dying by the hundreds, and it gets no mention in the media. It does not stop the world for even a second.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story said that Kareem Badawi was 23. He was 18.
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