Osama bin Laden's many victims include, first and foremost, those who died on Sept. 11, 2001, and their grieving families, the soldiers sent to war and the loved ones they left behind, and a new generation forced to grow up in a more polarized and paranoid world. For all of them, bin Laden's death must bring a sense of relief, of justice finally served.
But his victims also include millions of American Muslims — or Americans suspected of being Muslims — for whom the al-Qaida leader's death means something different: the chance to finally reclaim our faith and our identity.
In the fall of 2001, shortly before the terrorist attacks, I left New York City to attend business school at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. As a 25-year-old Muslim man with a dark complexion, I fit the stereotypical terrorist profile perfectly — and after al-Qaida struck, the world never let me forget it. On Sept. 12, my new roommate asked me what my religion was. He moved out the next day. A week later, a menacing mob of men chased me and two female Hindu classmates of mine for three city blocks, yelling that we were "Taliban." And the week after that, my parked motorbike was smashed by a car that, according to a witness, drove over it again and again.
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