'Seasons of Fury' traces the roots of Islamophobia in the United States
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Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbong. What makes a terrorist a terrorist? For example, why does one person who just talks about planting a bomb in New York get sentenced to 30 years in prison, while two people who actually commit an attack get 10 and 14 years? The journalist Rosina Ali talks about these questions and more in her book Seasons of Fury, which traces Islamophobia in the US. Homophobia isn't new in this country. It predates the reactions to Muslim politicians like New York City Mayor Zorn Mamdani. It predates the attacks on nine eleven. After the break, Ali talks to MPR Zalafadl about why her book begins in the nineteen sixties.
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In the post 911 era, American Muslims became the target of government suspicion, mass surveillance, and overreach because they happened to share a faith with the attackers. That was the America that investigative journalist Rosina Ali grew up in. So when she started her book on the roots of Islamophobia in the United States, fear that turned to hatred, she searched for the start of that bigotry and found that it took that took root well before America was attacked. The faith has long been depicted as foreign, as different, as dangerous, and that's despite Islam being part of the country since its founding. She tells the story through four families across eight decades in her new book Seasons of Fury.
Tell
me about the family you open the book with, the Jabbars. The Jabbar family, you know, the father served in the army. He was such a proud member. Of various organizations in their small town. And I really wanted to show how even this quintessential American small town family had been shaken by anti Arab and anti Muslim surveillance and targeting by the government. And this wasn't in the post nine eleven era. This was in the sixty seventies. Absolutely. The Israel Arab War of nineteen sixty-seven really shaped the political identity of a lot of Arab Americans living especially in Michigan. And FBI agents were visiting people in mosques or inquiring about who was attending mosques. And this was in nineteen sixty eight, nineteen sixty-nine.
Anti-Muslim sentiment in this country has been so closely intertwined with national security issues. And this idea that Muslims are foreign and that they present a national security threat because they're foreign. really took hold after nineteen sixty seven. And I do think that's one of the reasons why Anti Muslim sentiment remains one of the most enduring forms of racism in the United States today.
So in the post nine eleven era You spend a significant amount of time looking. at another family, the Siraj family, and a terrorism prosecution of a young man named Mateen, who's from that family. He doesn't buy anything, he doesn't actually build any bombs, but he is goaded into a plot by a law enforcement informant and talks about blowing up a New York subway station. He actually backs out of the plot entirely, but he gets thirty years. You also tell us the story of a couple white supremacists who do buy ammunition and plan out a racist attack that is then foiled just as it starts. There is one shot fired as you describe it in the book. And yet one gets ten years and one gets fourteen years while Mateen gets thirty years and was not far along in the process.
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