Not all Muslims are despairing at a Donald Trump presidency

The immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s surprise election victory brought a slew of comparisons with 9/11. In New York, my liberal friends waking up on 11/9 said they experienced the same range of emotions. You will have seen the stories of commuters weeping on the subway, colleges offering counselling to students and a general sentiment that life would never be the same again. Therapists reported an overwhelming sense of grief among their clients as they tried to process their world turned upside down. Robert de Niro chipped in, telling the Hollywood Reporter: ‘I feel like I did after 9/11.’ Whether or not the comparison was fair or even in good taste, the fact was that, for some, Trump’s victory evoked the same feelings of shock and disbelief as the mass murder of almost 3000 people.

I have been reflecting on that reaction in recent days after a visit to a mosque in Charlotte, North Carolina. The plan was to speak to Muslims about their fears for a Trump presidency and to collect anecdotal evidence of the rise in hate crimes reported after the November 8 election. The Ku Klux Klan were due