On Friday afternoon, members of the Utah Islamic Center filtered into the mosque’s prayer hall for weekly communal prayers. Outside, a security guard stood watch, now a routine presence on Fridays in Utah at the West Jordan-based mosque.
Several men arrived with their young sons, who fidgeted as they folded their arms, bowed and knelt on the mosque’s turquoise carpet. Behind a glass partition, elderly women sat on chairs in a separate section, while others were surrounded by children on the floor.
Standing in front of the community, Imam Shuaib Din told the worshippers they should not expect life to be easy. Muslims will face tests of their wealth and encounter hurtful words, and they should meet these trials with patience, the imam said, taking the “higher ground.”
He then turned attention to one of the mosque’s congregants, Syed Sohail Uddin, who was stabbed nearly 15 times on Monday afternoon at the Valley Fair Mall in West Valley City, Utah, allegedly because he was Muslim. The suspect, 48-year-old Peter Michael Larsen from Taylorsville, Utah, was charged on Friday with two counts of attempted aggravated murder, which is a first-degree felony, and one count of prohibited dangerous weapon conduct, a third-degree felony.
“This is the worst incident that has happened in our state, but … there are many others that don’t rise to the level of criminal behavior,” Imam Din told the community on Friday. Hate crimes tend to be the most underreported crimes, researchers found.
Last year, during Ramadan, Imam Din himself was the target of an alleged attack. As he pulled away from his home to go to the mosque, another driver pulled up alongside him and allegedly fired eight shots at the car. Prosecutors later said the crime was not an anti-Muslim hate crime, but stemmed from prior interactions between Imam Din and the suspect.
This week, however, Larsen explicitly expressed anti-Muslim sentiments to police. According to the charging document, he allegedly told investigators that he intended to “make an exhibition of Muslims” and “hopefully be a catalyst so people would rid the country of Muslims.”
Before repeatedly stabbing Uddin, Larsen also allegedly said, “Everything is like Jesus Christ.” Uddin has been hospitalized and has undergone hand surgery, his manager said in a video, and faces at least six months of recovery.
Religiously motivated hate crimes
Reported hate crimes in the United States have risen over the past decade, according to FBI data, though annual totals have fluctuated.
The FBI defines a hate crime as a criminal offense motivated fully or partly by bias against a person’s race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity. “Hate itself is not a crime, and the FBI is mindful of protecting freedom of speech and other civil liberties,” according to the FBI.
In 2024, religion was the second most common motivation for hate crime victims, accounting for 23.5% of all reported victims, trailing behind race and ethnicity.
While the overall number of reported hate crime incidents declined slightly from 2023 to 2024, crimes targeting people because of their religion were among the most common types of reported hate crimes.
Among the religion-based hate crime incidents recorded by the FBI in 2024, the Jewish people were the most frequently targeted group. Following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and a reported rise in antisemitic incidents, nearly 70% of religion-based hate crimes that year were motivated by anti-Jewish people.
In May of 2025, two Israeli Embassy employees were fatally shot outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., as they left an event hosted by the American Jewish Committee.
Muslims and other religious minorities have also experienced increases in reported discrimination and hate incidents.
In 2025, a man drove a pickup truck into a meetinghouse of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Grand Blanc Township, Michigan, during Sunday worship services, then opened fire on congregants and set the building ablaze in what the FBI described as a targeted act of violence.
Earlier this year, the Islamic Center of San Diego was targeted in a deadly shooting that killed three people. Investigators said the suspects left behind writings expressing anti-Muslim and other extremist views.
The complaints of anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian bias that the Council on American-Islamic Relations received in 2024 saw a 69% increase compared with the same period in 2023.
“The rhetoric that’s going around in this country, that’s being spewed by our political leaders — and the silence also from a lot of our political leaders — is something that’s having a real impact in the streets and in our community,” said Liban Mohamed, director of the Utah Muslim Civic League.
He said Monday’s stabbing was an example of “humanity being stripped from us.” The civic league is committed to helping Uddin financially if he chooses to pursue legal action, along with helping his family with medical bills.
Liban Mohamed said he wants to “reframe” how people see Muslims. “Because it’s getting to a point that this rhetoric is starting to turn into real belief,” Mohamed said.
Leaders from other faiths condemned the stabbing. “When hateful rhetoric is normalized or people are dehumanized because of their faith, race, ethnicity, or identity, the consequences can be devastating,” said Liz Paige of the United Jewish Federation of Utah in a statement.
She said the Jewish community was praying for Uddin’s recovery and stands with “our Muslim sisters and brothers.”
On Friday afternoon, Gov. Spencer Cox posted a message on X, condemning the attack.
“Religious freedom is one of America’s most fundamental liberties, and violence against anyone because of their faith has no place in Utah,” Cox wrote.
‘A virus on our community’
During Friday prayers, Imam Din’s address to the community focused on the different motives behind opposing Islam.
“For the majority of the people who harbor ill will against Islam and Muslims, it’s simply because of what they have heard in the media,” Imam Din said. “What they have been spoon-fed.”
These narratives have formed over the years and decades, he said. Anti-Muslim rhetoric and demonizing a group have consequences, he said — a “twisted individual” can go and commit a vicious act.
Imam Din then invited Utah’s District Attorney Sim Gill, who attended the prayer service, to address the community. “There are people in our community who do not like who we are … the community that we come from, the faith that we have,” Gill said to the group. “This kind of a hate crime is a virus in our community.”
According to the charging court document, Larsen had planned the attack. He allegedly picked the mall in West Valley City because he knew Muslims worked there and rode his scooter there, according to court documents. After watching a movie at the mall, he bought a knife from a store there. The knife had brass knuckles attached to it and was decorated with an American flag design.
Larsen engaged Uddin in a conversation and asked him if he was Muslim. Then Larsen reportedly invoked the name of Jesus Christ and began stabbing Uddin, inflicting wounds on his chest wall, his scalp, as well as hand and arm. Larsen allegedly told police he wanted to do “something extreme that would cause people to rise up and take the country back,” the court document said. He said Muslims didn’t “blend well” and would “take everybody over,” according to the charging document.
Employees from nearby stores intervened by throwing items at Larsen. Several bystanders tried to restrain Larsen, and after repeated punching by one of the men, Larsen dropped unconscious on the ground. Larsen had been convicted of a violent felony twice before and was committed to prison or a correctional facility, the court document said.
In a press conference on Friday, Gill said that the bystanders were “civilian heroes.”
On a recent Thursday at the Valley Fair Mall, workers at other nearby kiosks described feeling less safe than before. Mauricio Obregon, who opened the kiosk with his wife over a month ago, was out during the stabbing. He came to the U.S. from Colombia partly to escape violence that’s abundant in his native country.
“Spreading this hate for everybody because you don’t belong here — that’s the wrong way to go about everything,” he said. “We are all people, we live in the same world.”
One big family
At the mosque on Friday, Gill urged the believers to speak out and report any suspicious incidents.
“If we do not say that this is unacceptable, then we acquiesce to that hate, we acquiesce to that injury that others wanna commit upon us,” he said. “This is my home, this is your home and nobody has the right to threaten our families and our communities.”
At one point, the call to prayer chanted by one of the men, known as the azan, reverberated through the room.
During the break between prayers, several men distributed boxes with chicken and rice for lunch. They described their Muslim community as a large family, where one person’s suffering is carried by everyone.
Mohamed Mohamed, a congregant and local business owner, said he’s always felt welcome in Utah and never experienced discrimination. “Nobody told me to go back to my country,” he said. The Muslim community is just like any other, he said. “We have wives, we have kids. We cry. We fear for our children, our wives.”
The news about the mall’s incident didn’t receive sufficient coverage, congregant Suzanne Osman said, possibly because Uddin was Muslim. “If it was any other person, they would be speaking out about it so people don’t feel unsafe,” she said.
Emad Awad, who moved to Utah from Canada three years ago, sees education as key to correcting flawed narratives about the Muslim faith. “As a community we should participate in the collaboration with the government and the media,” he said.
In the press conference on Friday, Gill remained hopeful. He believed that both the Muslim community and those outside of it can rise above hateful rhetoric. “That does not define who we are as a community and who we are as a nation.”