“We’re Still Figuring Out Who We Are”: 20 Years After 9/11, Journalist Noor Tagouri Is Deconstructing The Muslim American Story
“Our whole childhood has been shaped by this moment in time,” says the 27-year-old journalist and activist. Her new documentary project seeks to interrogate the rigid script imposed on Muslims post-9/11—and perhaps to rewrite her own narrative in the process.
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Noor Tagouri is a lot of things: an award-winning journalist and producer; a woman of faith; a fashion icon. But on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, she spoke to me as herself, with all the labels stripped away—a 27-year-old Muslim woman grieving for her community, pitted against itself by a hostile society, interpreted as a monolith in a way that robs its individual members of their sense of personhood. She offered raw reflections on why she’d decided not to post about 9/11 on Instagram; the pressure to be a, quote, unquote, “good Muslim” rather than a “bad” one; and her own feeling of nebulousness, of struggling to parse who she really is versus who she feels pressured to be for other people.
Over the next few months, Tagouri—who has amassed a hefty following through her work as a journalist and activist—will search for that same vulnerability from others, collecting and editing submissions for her as-yet-untitled documentary and podcast series set to launch next spring. It will showcase stories from people who have been impacted by inaccurate representations of Muslim and Arab communities—people who are Muslim themselves, or those on the outside looking in. Her goal is to interrogate the constraints, misunderstandings, joys, fears, and outlets that perpetuate, hinder, and inform this intersection of faith and identity.
It’s a pivotal project for Tagouri. “I purposely avoided telling stories about Muslims for so long because I didn’t want to be typecast or pigeonholed,” she said. “This is the first time I’m actually telling a story around Muslims, because I’m ready.” Here, she offers a glimpse inside her head following a week defined by emotional gravity.
Vanity Fair: I recognize that we’re speaking on 9/11. How are you feeling?
Noor Tagouri: I have a lot of feelings today. I’m just now realizing, and it’s hitting me so hard, that…our whole childhood until now has kind of been shaped by this moment in time. [I was] on FaceTime with my old brother—he’s been on this intense 9/11 kick, watching every documentary and television show. It started from his curiosity [around] why he had to take his shoes off at the airport; why he had to [dump] water at the airport, especially because wasting food and drink in our faith is such a big thing. It wasn’t like we were all talking about it at home all the time. There was no difference, at least in my recollection, between how we spoke in our household before and after [9/11]—except for the fact that there was always this nervousness that you were being watched and surveilled. And you never wanted people to perceive you the wrong way. One of the things [my brother] said was, “I just want people to know we are not all like that.” It hurts my heart that he has to think about it. It’s really, really, really hard.
How do you feel you’ve had to navigate the world post-9/11?
I got a text message from my friend saying, “I was thinking of you when I was writing an Instagram post. I thought to myself, Wow, this might be perceived as bad Muslim behavior. So I deleted it.” We have lived our lives constantly trying to control how we’re being perceived because that’s the only way we feel safe. And that’s a scary place to be.
There’s this amazing documentary called The Feeling of Being Watched. This woman basically documents the surveillance happening within her own community. There’s one thing she mentioned that really stuck with me: A lot of Muslim American communities experienced surveillance—undercover Feds were coming into the mosque and building trust and relationships. But the state doesn’t have to surveil anybody anymore because we already act as if that’s happening. We hurt ourselves, police each other; we don’t support each other. We have this hostility because of this thing that happened that set us up for failure. We’re always asked, “How did this huge global thing impact your life?” And I’m like, you guys are thinking too big. The most monumental part of this experience is that we’re still figuring out who we are.
You haven’t been given the space to do that.
My brother is saying, “I hope they don’t think that we’re all like this,” and I’m like, you’re an American kid who’s growing up carrying the weight of something that was written for you before you were born. In order to protect ourselves from our own community—and people who are not familiar with our community—we constantly shapeshift into what we think they want us to be. That’s why I feel ready to do this project. We owe it to ourselves to understand why we feel the way that we do, [because] we have been in survival mode for so long.
We’re still not having hard conversations because we’re afraid of saying the wrong things. We are afraid that we are going to be punished or seen as a good Muslim or a bad Muslim. The George W. Bush phrase where he said, “You’re either with us, or you’re against us”—the ripple effect of that phrase completely obliterated our community. How do we know if we’re perceived as being with or against? When Hillary Clinton was campaigning, she said—with the intention of supporting Muslim Americans—“They’re our eyes and ears on the ground.” When I heard that, I thought I was going to throw up. Because I was like, I don’t know these people and haven’t met anyone who knows these people.
When you say “those people,” whom are you referring to?
I’m referring to who the United States would refer to as a terrorist. We’re having our story written through this group of people. That’s why it’s so monumental to have a show like Ramy or Hasan Minhaj’s Patriot Act or Hala. These started happening during Donald Trump’s presidency, and that was because Trump very explicitly talked about the “Muslim ban”—[but] that wasn’t the first Muslim ban. It happened 20 years ago too. [Ramy Youssef] sent us episodes of Ramy before it came out, so before there was any commentary. My husband and I watched it in silence, basically. At the end I looked at him and said, “I feel like I was just spied on.... Is that what representation feels like?” Because I’d never felt that way before.
When I was in college, I studied in Indonesia, which [has] the highest concentration of Muslims in the world. They had all these little prayer areas that were so beautiful. I got so excited, and I would go pray, because I pray five times a day. And I remember the Indonesian people being like, “Oh, you pray? You’re, like, actually Muslim?” That was the first time I realized that when you’re Muslim in America and you choose to be visibly Muslim or talk about being Muslim, you have to really figure out who you are. Because the story of being a Muslim American is so intensely already written for you.
I recently went to a neighbor’s house for dinner, and we were talking about a new boutique in our area. I asked if the owner was friendly to her, and she said yes. When I went in with my friend, he really wasn’t, but he was probably just having a bad day. Period, end of story. Because I have had to untrain myself from constantly being paranoid that people hate me. I purposely shared this with her. And all of a sudden she goes, “Oh, oh, no,” and gives me a hug. I was wearing my hijab and I had it tucked into my pants. Just two minutes before, her daughter had said, “Oh, cool. I didn’t know you could wear a scarf that way.” She calls her daughter over and goes, “Do you know what Noor is wearing on her head?” And her daughter goes, “Yes, a scarf. I really like it.” And the mom goes, “Well, a lot of people are prejudiced against people who wear that. That’s really sad.”
You’d become “educational” content.
The wrong education. Your daughter was praising my outfit, and now you’ve made me a victim. And by the way, I’m right there. You might not know what the hijab is, but if you want to lead by example, you could have asked me to explain, if I chose to, and your daughter could have learned about it through the mouth of a Muslim. But the story is already there, and it kept coming up that night. I spent all my energy trying to explain why I was fine. And that manifests in me when I’m actually not fine.
How has that experience—of being predetermined—impacted your journalism career?
What I’ve gone through is the only reason I’m as good of a journalist as I am. The first question I ask myself before I go into any story isn’t something I learned in journalism school; it’s something I learned from the pain of [misrepresentation] and how it has fatally impacted our communities. That question is, “How is the way I cover this story going to talk to the person or the community I’m [covering]?” When I was in local news, you had to turn over multiple news packages in one day. So you learn to write a script before you go to the scene, and then fill in the script with a couple of sound bites. But what are we limiting ourselves to when we’ve written the story for the person?
I’ll tie it to fashion week. I was talking to a friend of mine who was sitting next to this editor whose assistant was taking a video of her for Instagram. She was saying, “Oh, the show was amazing. The designer did such a great job,” but the show hadn’t started. She was prerecording what she was going to post. The intentionality behind the stories we are telling is just not there. She was saying this about fashion, and I can copy and paste it across all other mediums and genres.
Let’s talk about your project, which is going to be intentionally different.
This project is not about being Muslim post-9/11. It’s about questioning the stories that we’ve been spoon-fed about ourselves and our communities. I haven’t been hired because of my hijab and all of those things, but I’ve also had a fantastic life. I’ve had a job in journalism since I was 15; I worked in print, then radio, then local TV, then digital and documentary and podcasts. I’ve been so lucky to collect mentors, [to be] inspired by people who have done things unconventionally. Yet somehow certain questions in certain interviews [are] deficit-framed. For one of my most recent network interviews, one of the questions the anchor posed was, “What does it feel like to have a president who hates you?” It was referring to something I had said, but that was the thing she focused on. I felt sick, I felt my voice get higher, and I became exactly who I knew she wanted me to be. I knew better, but I was nervous and my survival mode kicked in. I like being the interviewer, but I don’t trust people to do interviews, because I’ve never had a 100% accurate one.
When the Vogue thing happened, we had reached out three times because nobody had called us to fact-check. Nobody answered. [Tagouri was misidentified as Pakistani actor Noor Bukhari in a 2019 issue of Vogue, which is also owned by Vanity Fair’s parent company, Condé Nast. Vogue apologized to both Tagouri and Bukhari for the error.] Even when they think they’re doing it, they’re not—they’re not listening. I worked with a brand while I was here for fashion week; when I got their gift bag, it was addressed to a different person. There’s another person with the same first name who wears hijab, and we always get mixed up. We are just not seen individually.
I can’t even bring myself to post anything today. I’m announcing this project, but I cannot do it. In the years after [9/11], we wouldn’t even think about attacks themselves; we couldn’t. We would always think about who did it. We would turn on the TV and think, Please don’t be Muslim, please don’t be Muslim. And then when they were Muslim, or claimed to be, all we would think about is how are we going to respond. I always felt so much rage about the fact that I was thinking about what I had to say. It’s not authentic. It feels like you’re doing it so that you’re not “bad,” so that you won’t get categorized or judged.
Essentially, you find yourself surveilling your own actions.
I’m trying to navigate pulling myself out of that place and asking myself, Who are you for you? Because that’s the only way we’re going to be able to take up as much space as possible and have these breakthroughs on a big scale. What does that mean for us to finally look at our lives and be like, Wait, what part of that was actually me? I’m sitting here 20 years later looking at 1 World Trade Center, looking at this peaceful, beautiful day. And I still can’t bring myself to say anything because I’m still trying to figure out my why.
How do you begin to unpack your why versus what you’re doing for other people, either in your community or outside of it?
Even though there are layers to the story, I’m still showing up as myself. I’ve still always followed my curiosity. I’ve just gotten a lot of flak for doing it the way that I have. Now I’m actively investigating the way we as Muslims figure out who we are. I purposely avoided telling stories about Muslims for so long because I didn’t want to be typecast or pigeonholed. This is the first time I’m actually telling a story around Muslims, because I’m ready.