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I noticed Abdul El-Sayed only after he had already taken his place at a 9/11 memorial in Lansing, Michigan, last Friday, standing not far from a piece of steel from the World Trade Center site. A ceremony for the attack’s 25th anniversary was starting, and he had come in quietly, head down, free from the fanfare that usually follows the surging Senate candidate. Firefighters and police officers stood around the Michigan September 11 Memorial in Wentworth Park, where the tribute was built in a public space that has been used to mourn firefighters since 1934. A chaplain read the names of Michiganders killed in the attacks.

El-Sayed’s campaign had already released a video condemning and memorializing 9/11 that morning. “Nothing can justify the murder of innocent civilians. Nothing,” he says in it. The absence of such a statement threatened to become a story in of itself on Fox News. For most politicians, calling the 9/11 attacks evil would be unremarkable. But if El-Sayed got the ritual wrong—or even appeared insufficiently eager to perform it—there was already a political apparatus waiting to tell voters what that says about him and Muslims around the world.

In person Friday morning, El-Sayed mostly stood there and listened. Rep. Tom Barrett, a Republican congressman running for reelection in Michigan’s 7th District, was one of several speakers who talked about the unity that followed 9/11. Lansing fire chief Carrie Edwards-Clemons recalled Americans treating one another with “respect, compassion, and love that carried us through the days after 9/11.”

Everyone seemed to remember the aftermath of the attack as a moment when Americans came together. I remembered it differently. I was 11, attending an Islamic school in northern New Jersey. I remember the attacks themselves. I remember not knowing the whereabouts of my father, who worked in Manhattan, and thinking he might be dead. But when people recall the weeks afterward as a time when the country came together, I remember another America arriving almost immediately. Our school shut down amid protests and hostility. Muslim families around me clung to American flags, afraid they would be subject to some kind of retaliation. There was the surveillance, the raids, the FBI showing up at my family’s door in Newark, my brother ending up on a no-fly list, and a government response abroad whose boundaries seemed to expand for years.

The two memories have never been separable for me: the horror of what happened on Sept. 11 and then what happened because of it. El-Sayed, in less charged moments, has spoken of this duality in his own life. But in the campaign, the balancing act proved impossible.

Since he won the Democratic primary, Republicans and conservative activists have increasingly used his religion against him. Donald Trump has called him a jihadist, and other figures on the right have called him an Islamist or menacingly emphasized his full Arabic name. Mike Rogers, his Republican opponent, has seized upon a clip of his once campaign partner, Hasan Piker, saying in 2019 that he believed America deserved 9/11. Piker later renounced the statement, saying it was wrong, but the fact that he said it once still continues to........

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