Former President George W. Bush revisited one of the defining decisions of his first week after the September 11, 2001, attacks on Wednesday evening, September 9, 2026, telling an audience at his presidential center in Dallas that reports of Muslim women being harassed in public sent him to a Washington mosque.

Bush, 80, shared the stage with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for “A Legacy of Service: America at the 25th Anniversary of 9/11.” Rice was serving as national security adviser when al-Qaeda struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and she 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 brought the conversation around to that trip, asking how Bush had tried to signal to Muslim American citizens that the country was not blaming them for what had happened.

He cast the visit as a test of the nation’s own principles, describing the fight as an ideological struggle. To abandon the freedom to worship as one chooses, he said, 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

Six days after the attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people, Bush traveled to the Islamic Center of Washington and declared, “Islam is peace.” The stop on September 17, 2001, became one of the most visible pieces of his response. Meeting there with Muslim community leaders, he raised how Muslim women wearing head coverings were being treated, saying he had heard some were afraid to leave home or go shopping out of fear of intimidation. “That should not and that will not stand in America,” he said at the time.

Known both as “Remarks at the Islamic Center of Washington” and as “Islam Is Peace,” the address separated the hijackers from the faith they claimed. Bush said 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 quoted from the Quran as well.

That message had surfaced before the mosque stop. Talking with journalists on September 13, 2001, Bush urged Americans to treat Arab Americans and Muslim Americans with respect. The next day, September 14, 2001 — a National Day of Prayer he had proclaimed — he spoke at a memorial service that also included Muzammil H. Siddiqi, a Muslim imam. As president, his first public comments about Islam had come earlier that year, in a statement marking Eid al-Adha issued on March 7, 2001.

Response to the 2001 speech was not uniform. Hate crimes committed against Muslims fell in the period afterward, compared with the days immediately before the remarks. Some conservative Christians criticized the administration for distinguishing between Islam broadly and terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda. Rosemarie Skaine, a sociologist, argued that the speech demonstrated how Bush generally helped reduce Islamophobia in the United States. Louise Cainkar, also a sociologist, called it a positive speech while saying that other addresses by Bush, which cast Muslims as hostile to America, undercut it. On June 27, 2007, Bush went back to the Islamic Center to speak at its rededication ceremony.

Inside the Days After the Attacks

Much of the Dallas conversation went well beyond the mosque visit. Bush walked through 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. “9/11 was a clarifying moment for me and you and others in our administration because we realized that we were vulnerable to attack based upon what we believe,” Bush said, adding, “Based upon a belief system.” Other members of his administration also attended.

Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke at the September 9 event as well, telling Bush he “didn’t sign up to become a wartime president, but you became one.” He added, “Leadership starts at the top.”

Bush also recounted how he sized up the attacks as they unfolded. “There was no doubt in my mind that this was not a law-enforcement event. This was a war,” he said.

Rice recounted those days from inside the White House. She said the administration pushed the FBI and the CIA into sharing intelligence for the first time on the morning after the attacks, a step civil liberties concerns had blocked, leaving the two agencies unable to really talk to each other. Every morning, Robert Mueller, then the FBI director, and George Tenet, then the CIA director, walked into the Oval Office to lay the threat matrix in front of the president; between September 10 and September 12, 2001, she said, it swelled to the size of a phonebook.

Public support for Bush climbed in the weeks after the attacks 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. On Friday, September 11, Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush joined a ceremony marking the anniversary in New York City. Each of the 2,983 names on the 9/11 memorial wall was read aloud at Ground Zero, accompanied by soft music. From a pulpit there, Daniella Wald, daughter of victim Victor Wald, said: “Daddy, wow, 25 years.”