A man allegedly threatened to kill four Muslim men who were distributing copies of the Quran outside a library in Troy, Michigan, prompting a US Muslim civil rights group to call for hate crime charges.
The four men were answering questions about Islam and handing out copies of the Quran when another man approached them and allegedly said he had a gun and threatened to kill them after learning they were Muslim.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) called on police to investigate the incident as a potential hate crime and review all available evidence.
"This cannot be dismissed as offensive speech or a heated disagreement," said Amy V. Doukoure, lead staff attorney at CAIR-Michigan.
The New Arab has contacted the Troy Police Department for comment.
Rising Islamophobia
The incident comes amid heightened anti-Muslim rhetoric in the US, including attacks against Muslim political figures such as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
Last week, families of victims of the 9/11 attacks and Republican politicians demonstrated outside New York City Hall, calling for Mamdani not to participate in a commemoration marking the 25th anniversary of the attacks.
Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani said Mamdani's presence at the ceremony "offends me".
Mamdani, New York's first Muslim mayor, has previously spoken about the impact of the 9/11 attacks, which were carried out by al-Qaeda.
During his 2025 mayoral campaign, Mamdani said his aunt "stopped taking the subway after September 11 because she did not feel safe in her hijab."
El-Sayed, who was 15 at the time of the attacks, has also spoken about experiencing Islamophobia in the years that followed.
"I went from being a brown kid with a funny name to being a very particular kind of brown kid with a very particular kind of funny name," he told the Pod Save America podcast.
Republican politicians have repeatedly sought to link El-Sayed to terrorism. Senator Tommy Tuberville called him a "terrorist" and "radical islamist" in a post on X.
On Thursday, an attendee at the Republican National Convention shouted "he should be shot" after Vice President JD Vance mentioned El-Sayed during a speech. Neither Vance nor the event's security team responded publicly to the threat.
CAIR-Michigan's Doukoure told The New Arab that American Muslims continued to face collective blame from political figures across the US.
"There are no other faith groups that are lumped together with collective blame by both the Republican and Democratic parties the way that American Muslims are, and that starts with mainstream political candidates attacking Mayor Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed, and others who have come before them," she said.
9/11 and Islamophobia
The 9/11 attacks were followed by a sharp rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes in the US. FBI data shows that reported anti-Muslim hate crimes increased by 1,600% in 2001 compared with the previous year.
While no subsequent year has recorded as many anti-Muslim hate crimes as 2001, reported incidents have remained above 2000 levels.
Polling also suggests that negative views of Islam remain widespread in the US.
A recent Pew Research Center report found that 52% of Americans in 2026 believed Islam was "more likely than other religions to encourage violence", compared with 25 percent in 2002.