Seasons of Fury

This sweeping narrative history chronicles the U.S. government’s broken compact with its Muslim citizens, culminating in the post-9/11 era of mass surveillance and increased violence—from an award-winning New York Times Magazine journalist. In this closely reported and devastatingly written book, Rozina Ali shows how the War on Terror conceived in the wake of the September 11 attacks only accelerated long-standing conflicts between American law enforcement and Muslim communities around the country. Through the powerful stories of four families across eight decades, Ali narrates a range of Muslim experiences shaped by relentless suspicion and prejudice. Introducing readers to Abdeen Jabara, Mohammad Ali Chaudry, Shahina and Matin Siraj, and the pseudonymous Omar family, she shows how fears about American Muslims have always been inextricable from the Israel–Palestine conflict, stoking the idea of a religious war between Muslims and the west. Seasons of Fury is a history of policies that warped the American imagination, from laws in the 1990s that broadened the definition of terrorism, to mass detention and surveillance of entire Muslim communities in the 2000s, to the rise of think tanks and nonprofits that sowed panic about the threat of Islam itself. Ultimately, the U.S. political machine disillusioned generations of Muslims who sought the promise of the American dream only to find their communities torn apart, their relatives imprisoned, and their religion villainized by politicians and media. This is the story of how we got to our terrifying present—the inevitable consequence of the country’s willingness to turn its back on the founding principle of religious equality.