Coping with the 10th anniversary of 9/11: Muslim Americans' sadness, fear, and anger

Abstract

The events of 9/11 marked an increase in prejudice, discrimination, and other forms of unfair treatment toward Muslim Americans. We present a study that examined the emotions of Muslim Americans in the days preceding the ten-year 9/11 anniversary. We measured the antecedents (concerns) and consequences (coping) of sadness, fear, and anger. The 9/11 anniversary precipitated intense concerns with loss and discrimination, and intense feelings of sadness, fear, and anger. We measured three coping responses: rumination, avoidance of public places, and religious coping. Participants engaged in all three coping responses, with seeking solace in one's religion being the most frequent response. Moreover, emotions mediated the relationship between concerns and coping responses. Sadness accounted for the association between concern with loss and rumination. Fear explained the association between concern with discrimination and avoidance. Anger accounted for the association between concern with discrimination and religious coping.

Keywords:

• Coping
• Anger
• Sadness
• Fear
• Muslim Americans
• 9/11

Acknowledgments

Sincere thanks are due to Muslim Student Associations, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-Chicago) and their student volunteers, the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago and their student volunteers, Ahlam Jbara, Amal Ali, Zainab Khan, and Hira Jafri for their assistance in data collection. We are especially indebted to Gerald Hankerson from CAIR Chicago for his continuous support. We also thank Clara Wilkins for her helpful comments.

Notes

¹We compared 9/11 vs. pre-9/11 responses on all measures. Due to the unequal sample sizes between responses on 9/11 vs. responses before 9/11, a non-parametric Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used. None of the tests were significant.

²Bootstrapping is recommended over the Sobel test as the former is a non-parametric approach that makes no assumptions about the shape of distributions for either variables or statistics. Further, Preacher and Hayes recommend analyses with bootstrapping with at least 1,000 samples (Preacher & Hayes, 2004). A follow-up analysis using 5,000 samples yielded the same findings. In addition, Cook's distances were calculated to examine whether any observations had high leverage in the regression models. In all models, no observations had high leverage according to the conventional cut-off value of D _i >1 (Cook & Weisberg, 1982).