America's war on Muslims

A new book by Rozina Ali traces the rise of anti-Islamic sentiment in the wake of 9/11, showing how ordinary residents became targets of fear and suspicion

By Spencer Ackerman 

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

By Rozina Ali

Published by Crown

446 pages $32 

There is a cherished myth about 9/11, one evident during the recent 25th-anniversary commemorations, according to which the attacks united the country. Like many myths, it contains grains of truth. The early “war on terror” registered levels of political consensus not since repeated. But the myth obscures the millions of people whom the consensus not only excluded but targeted.

 

A more recent myth says that after the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq failed, the wars came home. There are grains of truth here, too. Black Lives Matter protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, faced police officers wielding military equipment developed for those occupations overseas. But like the first myth, this second one obscures how, from the very first moments after 9/11, the war was already at home. Federal agents and vigilantes fanned out in search of post-9/11 threats.  They found them in Muslim communities.

 

 

Rozina Ali’s unforgettable new book, Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America, takes an overdue hammer to these myths. A thorough, subtle reporter and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, Ms Ali presents a disparate record of American Muslim life as she follows a Michigan-born civil rights lawyer; working-class Pakistani immigrants in Queens; a suburban Palestinian family; and a Republican mayor in Basking Ridge, New Jersey. Through their varied experiences, Ms Ali details what it is to survive state persecution draped in the legitimacy of counterterrorism. Often their ordeals were greeted with silence by neighbours, and sometimes with approval.

 

The overwhelming majority of Muslims targeted by law enforcement and immigration authorities over the past 25 years had no connection to 9/11, Al Qaeda or political violence. In the post-9/11 atmosphere of collective suspicion, it did not matter. Within two months of the attacks, at least 1,182 people had been rounded up and detained, and many had been deported. The next year, the Justice Department required “special registration” for immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries, eventually creating a database of more than 80,000 people. Registrants, Ms Ali writes, feared they would be jailed and deported whether they complied or not.

 

Not many genuine terrorist plots emerged from American Muslims. Mostly prosecutors went after the webs of association emanating from newly criminalised organisations, often those supporting Palestinians. In some cases, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies manufactured threats. As Ms Ali reports, one paid informant, Osama El Dawoody, manipulated a 21-year-old Pakistani immigrant from Queens, Matin Siraj, into a concocted plot to bomb Herald Square, in Midtown Manhattan, in 2004. Siraj, who thought the scheme was just talk, backed away as El Dawoody’s entreaties intensified. He was nevertheless arrested, tried and convicted on four counts of conspiracy to destroy property. One of the many triumphs of Seasons of Fury is Ms Ali’s account of the Siraj family, which she follows as Matin ages in prison and his parents and sister are arrested by ICE agents while coping with the injustice of his incarceration.

 

Law enforcement agents violated Muslim civil rights in the name of keeping America safe, even as American Muslims came under persistent assault. The shop windows of a Brooklyn fabric store owner named Mohammed Razvi were shot out while the ashes of the World Trade Centre were still blowing over Coney Island Avenue. A decade later, in Tennessee, unknown assailants burned construction equipment intended for use in the building of a mosque. This past May, two teenage gunmen entered the Islamic Center of San Diego and shot to death three men who stopped them from advancing on the 140 children inside.

 

Even the spectre of violence is life-changing. It happens to the Omars, a Palestinian family of five whose journey Ms Ali arrestingly chronicles (and to whom she gives a pseudonym). Their 50-something neighbour in an unnamed Eastern Seaboard suburb harasses them for years. The American flag the Omars hang outside their home is no shield. They refer to their neighbour only as Mr Happy, adding to the air of menace looming over these chapters. When the Omars win a protective order against him, which would expire after two years, Mr Happy laughs his way out of the courtroom.

 

Seasons of Fury, which has been longlisted for the National Book Award, insightfully shows how even before 9/11 American Muslims were already dehumanised. The FBI’s infamous Cointelpro initiative (1956-71) involved spying on Arab lawyers, activists and students for perceived ties to radicals.

 

The Iran hostage crisis, the 1991 Persian Gulf war and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing fueled a portrayal of terrorism as something only Muslims did. When the white supremacist Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, a Democratic former House Intelligence Committee chairman, along with pundits from mainstream outlets presumed Muslims were responsible.

 

By bringing the ordeal of American Muslims out from the margins, Seasons of Fury indicts the society that sacrificed them on the altar of 9/11. The recent ICE raids and roundups emerge directly from normalising the repression of Muslims. Those now locked in ICE detention centres, and those soon to be, can only hope they will not be similarly abandoned by their neighbours.

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The reviewer is a Pulitzer Prize- and National Magazine Award-winning reporter. ©2026 The New York Times News Service