Timothy Williams and Sean Piccoli

Throughout a tense day, law enforcement officials and political leaders assured Muslims that they would be protected as they prepared for Friday Prayer, the very thing the victims had been doing when they died.

The news trickled out overnight in dread-inducing bulletins as the death toll climbed by the hour. The United States is home to about 3.5 million Muslims, or 1 percent of the nation’s population. Some said they had stayed up all night, unable to tear themselves away from the coverage, as difficult as it was to take in.

Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, said that Muslims around the world were in mourning and that the attacks were part of a rising intolerance in the United States and abroad.

“Do not be afraid, and do not abandon your mosques — not today, not ever,” Awad said at a news conference in Washington. “They want you to be afraid. You should not be afraid.”

Police departments in major U.S. cities intensified security around houses of worship. At some mosques in New York, clusters of police officers wearing tactical gear and armed with semi-automatic rifles stood sentry as worshippers entered for prayer.

Mayor Bill de Blasio said that the city had increased its police presence at mosques “out of an abundance of caution.”

“New Yorkers heading to prayer can be confident that their city will protect them,” he said.

At the At-Taqwa mosque in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, three officers from the 79th Precinct stood out front greeting people.

Saydu Bah, 39, who said he came frequently to worship at the mosque, stood fixated on his phone. He was watching what he said was a video of the attack that had been filmed by the gunman. The footage appeared on social media throughout the day despite attempts by Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to remove copies.

“You saw?” he asked in disbelief, holding up his phone and then narrating what was happening. “He kept killing, killing, killing. Nobody stopped him.”

At a mobile phone supply store nearby, Mouaad Youssef, an 18-year-old college student, stood behind the counter, talking with worshippers who had stopped by.

He too had seen the massacre video. “I didn’t even want to look at it,” said Youssef, who is Muslim. “It is very bad.”

He paraphrased a passage from the Quran about killing, saying, “Only God gave a soul to humanity, and he’s the only one who has the right to take it.”

In Pittsburgh, where an attack last year on the Tree of Life synagogue killed 11 people, city officials said they had “heavy hearts and an all-too-intimate understanding of what the people of New Zealand are enduring.”

The city said its officers had been in contact with local Muslim leaders and had increased patrols at mosques and other areas.

The Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh said that it had begun raising funds for the Muslim community in New Zealand. After last year’s mass shooting, Muslim organizations donated more than $200,000 to support Pittsburgh’s Jewish community.

And in St. Paul, Minnesota, home to a large Muslim community, the Police Department assured residents that they would be protected.

“We want our Muslim family members, friends and neighbors to know that we’ll do everything possible to keep you safe and secure in the city we share,” the department said on Twitter.

Across the Mississippi River in North Minneapolis, Makram El-Amin, the imam at the Masjid An-Nur, or Mosque of Light, told worshippers that the dead in New Zealand had been doing what hundreds of millions of other Muslims take part in each week: a simple observance of Friday prayers.

“They were doing nothing more than trying to live their best lives and respond to the call of Islam,” he said. “There’s a vulnerability here.”

President Donald Trump denounced the attacks. “My warmest sympathy and best wishes goes out to the people of New Zealand after the horrible massacre in the Mosques'” he wrote on Twitter. “The U.S. stands by New Zealand for anything we can do. God bless all!”

For some, the killings at the mosque revived criticism that political leaders had been partly responsible for creating an environment that had made people comfortable expressing hateful views.

“The president’s rhetoric is part of the problem,” said Iman Boukadoum, a senior staff attorney with the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, a civil rights organization based in Washington.

Although some Muslims expressed trepidation about worshipping on Friday, many mosques said turnout was about average.

At the Masjid An-Nur in North Minneapolis, Omar Aded, 48, said he had learned about the New Zealand attacks while watching CNN.

“It’s very painful,” Aded said. “No one should target another, no matter what religion — Jewish, Muslim or Christian.”

“But there can be no revenge,” he added. “We have to look past the violence.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/15/us/mosque-security.html" id="6e30020b-c6a9-3739-a5b1-9e464fe0846f">The New York Times</a>.

U.S. Muslims Mourn and Mosques Heighten Security After New Zealand Attacks

Muslims in cities across the United States walked past heavily armed police officers to attend services Friday, hours after a gunman killed at least 49 people at two mosques in New Zealand. They pored over news reports with a mixture of grief and disgust, feeling familiar fears of being targeted for their religious beliefs.

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Timothy Williams and Sean Piccoli

Articles written by the author

U.S. Muslims Mourn and Mosques Heighten Security After New Zealand Attacks