Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America

Twenty-five years ago, a deadly attack struck American soil. On September 11th, 2001, al-Qaeda militants killed over 3,000 Americans. In the days after the attacks, President George W. Bush inaugurated the Global War on Terror (GWoT). This war abroad became a violent borderless and timeless campaign targeting several countries and resulting in millions of deaths. At home, it placed Muslim Americans under a microscope, casting them as suspicious, untrustworthy, and potentially dangerous.

In her new book, Rozina Ali shows that the War on Terror at home didn’t begin in 2001, rather it’s formal inauguration that year only accelerated long-standing conflicts between American law enforcement and Muslim communities around the country. From the surveillance of Arab activists that began in the 1960s and laws in the 90s that broadened the definition of terrorism, to the mass detention of entire Muslim communities in the 2000s and the rise of think tanks and nonprofits that sowed panic about the threat of Islam itself, Seasons of Fury traces how the policies that warped America’s perception of Muslim communities reach deep into our past.

Ali follows four families across eight decades to capture the range of Muslim experiences shaped by suspicion and prejudice. She also argues that Islamophobia in America has never been separable from the Israel–Palestine conflict, which has fueled the notion of a religious war between Muslims and the West. That logic is most visible in the rhetoric of American politicians on both sides of the aisle, who invoke a “civilizational” framing that casts Muslims as fundamentally at odds with “the West.” The U.S. government’s post-9/11 Islamophobic policies disillusioned generations of Muslims who came seeking the American dream, only to watch their communities torn apart, their relatives imprisoned, and their religion vilified by politicians and media alike. Seasons of Fury traces how we arrived at this moment.

Speaker’s Biography

Rozina Ali is a journalist and contributing writer at New York Times Magazine, a fellow at Type Media Center, a fellow at New America, and was previously a senior editor at The Cairo Review of Global Affairs. Ali writes primarily about the War on Terror, Islamophobia, the Middle East, and South Asia, and her work has been featured in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Foreign Affairs, The Nation, The American Prospect, and more. Ali is a recipient of the National Magazine Award in Reporting.