Former President George W. Bush revisited one of the defining decisions of his first week after the September 11, 2001, attacks, telling an audience at his presidential center in Dallas on Wednesday evening, September 9, 2026, that he went to a Washington mosque because reports had reached him of Muslim women being harassed in public.
Bush, 80, spoke at “A Legacy of Service: America at the 25th Anniversary of 9/11,” an onstage conversation with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was serving as national security adviser when al-Qaeda struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and who 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.”
Revisiting the Islamic Center Visit
Rice steered the discussion toward that trip, asking the former president to describe how he had tried to reassure Muslim American citizens that they were not being blamed for what had happened.
Bush framed the visit as a test of the country’s own principles. He said he viewed the fight as an ideological struggle, and that giving up 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.
What He Told the Country in 2001
The mosque visit became one of the most visible pieces of Bush’s response to the attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people. Six days afterward, on September 17, 2001, he traveled to the Islamic Center of Washington and declared, “Islam is peace.” Meeting with Muslim community leaders there, he raised the treatment of Muslim women who wore head coverings, saying he had been told that some were afraid to leave their homes or go shopping for fear of being intimidated. “That should not and that will not stand in America,” he said at the time.
The address, 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. Bush told the country that the attackers had perverted Islam, that terrorism did not represent the religion’s true face, and he praised the contributions Muslim Americans make to national life. He also quoted a passage from the Quran during the remarks.
The mosque stop was not his first attempt at that message. Speaking with journalists on September 13, 2001, he urged Americans to treat Arab Americans and Muslim Americans with respect. The following day, September 14, a National Day of Prayer he had proclaimed, he addressed a memorial service in which Muzammil H. Siddiqi, a Muslim imam, also took part. His first public comments about Islam as president had come earlier that year in a statement marking Eid al-Adha — the first American presidential statement issued for the holiday.
The reaction to the 2001 speech was not uniform. Compared with the days immediately before the remarks, the number of hate crimes committed against Muslims fell afterward. Some conservative Christians criticized the administration for distinguishing between Islam broadly and terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda. Sociologist Rosemarie Skaine argued that the speech showed how Bush generally helped reduce Islamophobia in the United States, while sociologist Louise Cainkar called it a positive speech but said Bush undercut it in other addresses that cast Muslims as hostile to America. Bush returned to the Islamic Center on June 27, 2007, to speak at its rededication ceremony.
Inside the Days After the Attacks
The Dallas conversation ranged well beyond the mosque visit. Bush described the day of the attacks itself, the way the American public rallied afterward and the surge he saw in military recruitment and volunteering — a response he said he got to see firsthand.
Rice described those days from inside the White House. The morning after the attacks, she said, the administration had to forge intelligence sharing between the FBI and the CIA for the first time, 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, came into the Oval Office every morning to show the president the threat matrix, which she said swelled to the size of a phonebook between September 10 and September 12.
In the weeks after the attacks, Bush’s standing with the public climbed 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, arguing that those Americans never saw the sacrifice and courage of that time and pressing the case for keeping the history alive. Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush are set to join a ceremony marking the anniversary in New York City on Friday, September 11, 2026. A separate moment of remembrance is planned at the Bush Center inside the museum at 8:30 a.m. Friday.