In Conversation with Rozina Ali
Rozina Ali’s new book, Seasons of Fury: Four Families and the Rise of Islamophobia in America, is essential reading for our moment. Surveillance, informants, entrapment, draconian prison conditions, harassment, hate crimes, deportation, deeply pernicious stereotypes — the litany of ignorance and injustice she documents will infuriate you, and the resilience she chronicles will move you. Rozina is an award-winning journalist, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, and a contributing editor to Lux, where she’s profiled the poet Solmaz Sharif and reviewed the work of Isabella Hammad and Ta-Nahesi Coates. We spoke earlier this month by phone. Our conversation has been condensed and edited. —Cora Currier
CORA CURRIER This book begins in the 1940s, with a childhood memory of a man named Abdeen Jabara picking mulberries in northern Michigan. Your treatment of the family histories is novelistic in scope and detail, and in how they intertwine with world events. Why did you decide to write the book this way?
ROZINA ALI That first chapter is titled “Memories.” It was a reflection of somebody remembering both his childhood and America; there was a real America-nostalgia I wanted to capture. For so long, Muslims and Islam have been seen as foreign, and I really wanted to start this book with someone who was already in the country, a Muslim who was already part of the American fabric.
CC You show the way that terrorism came to be equated with Islam and how, at the same time, political grievances were recast as religious ideology. How did that come about?
RA Abdeen was surveilled after the 1967 Arab-Israel War for his political activism, his pro-Palestine activism — though he was a Muslim he was really surveilled for being Arab and for the work he was doing. In the post-9/11 period, a lot of people were similarly surveilled for their activism (and a lot of times for their pro-Palestine activism), but also because they were Muslim. The informants and FBI agents and NYPD and so forth who were surveilling people went to mosques and Islamic institutions to look for potential threats. They were just crawling through these neighborhoods and communities to see if they could find potential radical elements. And one of the reasons they were able to get away with it is because our idea of terrorism had become so broad by 9/11 that it could mean almost anything.
In the 1980s, the U.S. government considered terrorism a tactic that was used by militant groups as a means to a political end. But in the ’80s that definition was also shifting from a tactic to an ideology: Terrorist groups were doing terrorism because they were evil. By 9/11 there was an adoption of this broad definition, plus this suspicion of Muslim communities; those things worked in tandem to suggest that terrorist elements were found among Muslims. If terrorism meant evil, then evil was brewing among Muslim communities. This suspicion was bolstered by policies, by convictions in court, by sentencing, and by experts who insisted that radical elements were to be found among Muslims.
CC You show the credence on the part of judges, from the judicial system, from politicians — credence given to the most flimsy charges, the most circumstantial suspicion. The whole system was set up to believe in this.
RA Yes, exactly. This is the problem with prevention as a policy measure: “We are going to stop threats before an attack happens.” But what was the basis of actually putting people in jail? This is not to say that everyone was completely innocent — one of the people I write about in my book is Matin Siraj, a person who was convicted of terrorism after he was lured by an undercover informant and they discussed a violent plot against Herald Square. Now, for some period of time he did start planning it with the informant, but they did not detail any weapons or even a time or day. Matin tried to get out of the plot multiple times. He ended up in jail for 30 years. One thing I want readers to contend with is how much our justice system has reinforced the notion that Muslims are particularly and uniquely dangerous, so much so that they deserve 30 years in prison when they have not committed an act of violence.
CC One obvious question is to ask where these post-9/11 measures are now being more broadly applied — but I am almost hesitant to ask because it feels a bit like the truism about the war coming home, like we should only care about the war on terror because of how it affects Americans, not people abroad. I think your book really resists that framing, that you should care about these post-9/11 injustices because now Trump’s going to use them against us all, Muslim and non. It is really focused on the distinct ways that this discrimination has functioned.
RA Yes, it functions distinctly, but one of my aims with this book was to show how Islamophobia has not just affected Muslims but has permanently altered American politics, the legal system, and society. For example, one of the laws I write about in the book, the material support law, was created in the 1990s, and it was used to prosecute a lot of Muslim defendants after 9/11 for supporting terrorist groups or actions. The problem is both “material support” and “terrorism” were so vague and broadly defined. Those laws are now being used to target what the Trump Administration considers terrorists, which are leftists and anti-ICE activists. He’s able to do that because there has long been a bipartisan acceptance of the use of these words in the U.S. justice system. That’s one way in which Islamophobia has altered the legal landscape. Another way in which it’s done so is the expansion of that anti-immigration agenda. What we saw after 9/11 was a dramatic expansion of immigration detention, and the bolstering of private companies like GEO and CoreCivic. The other thing that happened was we created ICE, which was used to go after immigrants more aggressively inside the country. And we’re seeing this bear out today under an administration that’s so explicitly anti-immigrant.
CC The group DRUM (Desis Rising Up and Moving) reappears throughout the book — it seemed to me, as a force of hope and resistance amid the currents of repression you document. How did you come to focus on their efforts among the many organizations that mobilized after 9/11?
RA I would find families who I wanted to talk to, and when I was looking for a way to connect with them, DRUM just kept coming up over and over again. When I started talking to them I realized that they were one of the few organizations that were on the ground working on this nexis between immigration policies and anti-Muslim discrimination after 9/11. I was not in New York after 9/11, but when I started reporting and researching I was thinking that it must have been such an incredibly frightening time for Muslim and immigrant communities. Authorities were picking up people off the streets and from their workplaces and their homes even if there were no criminal charges, even if they had not done anything wrong, and DRUM — which had just been founded a few years prior — was on the ground actually trying to speak to people. They found the people who were being sent to detention centers with no one to turn to and no way to get home.
CC The families you follow, you write, were “all propelled by a stubborn hope that one day the War on Terror would subside,” that there might even be some piecemeal justice for its wrongs. What would that subsidence look like to you, or for them?
RA One of the features of this war that we don’t talk about enough is that it never came to an end. We did leave Iraq, we did leave Afghanistan, but those two countries were only one part of a global war on terror. I think that even 10 years ago these families that I wrote about would have had a different hope. I think they were hoping for justice, they were hoping that this country would finally start accepting the Muslim community as part of the social and political fabric. It’s hard to say that’s still the hope now, given the level of vitriol and not just anti-Muslim sentiment, but anti-Islam sentiment. The prevalent narrative we hear today from the right wing is that we are in a religious war and that Islam should not belong in the country.
For a lot of people that I spoke with, the victories they see are more personal. Shahina, who is Matin Siraj’s mother, still wants her son to come home. He is still in prison. That’s all she thinks about.
CC You note in the epilogue that you were struggling to find an ending for the book — and then came October 7, 2023. What changed?
RA There was an interesting moment when Trump first came to power. Everyone was calling it the most Islamophobic administration in U.S. history, and there was resistance to the racism that he was peddling. It was pretty prevalent resistance, among commentators and media and policymakers.
CC And the public, the airport protests against the “Muslim bans.”
RA Right. When the Biden Administration came into power, they really made it a point to say that they welcomed Muslims and they announced that they were going to create a strategy to combat Islamophobia. That was a conversation that was happening at the White House. After October 7, many people in the White House became resistant to actually launching the strategy. October 7 illustrated just how intertwined Islamophobia in the U.S. is with U.S. foreign policy towards Israel and Palestine. It shifted the conversation yet again to one of national security, to one of terrorist threats.
Islamophobia in the U.S. has been a result of a lot of choices we have made. The one thing that gives me hope these days is remembering that the Islamophobia and anti-Muslim vitriol we see today was not fated, is not inevitable. We can make different choices. I hope that happens.