LEILA FADEL, HOST:
In the post-9/11 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 Rozina 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 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 this 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 Jabaras.
ROZINA ALI: The Jabara 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.
FADEL: And this wasn't in the post-9/11 era. This was in the '60s, '70s.
ALI: Absolutely. The Israel-Arab war of 1967 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 1968, 1969. 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 1967. 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.
FADEL: So in the post-9/11 era, you spend a significant amount of time looking at another family - the Siraj family - and a terrorism prosecution of a young man named Matin 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 30 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 10 years and one gets 14 years, while Matin gets 30 years and was not far along in the process. What did examining Matin's case versus other nonterrorism prosecution cases tell you?
ALI: The way that terrorism has been litigated has been really uneven. What that does, at the end of the day, is place a moral category on the Muslim community that has been caught up in counterterrorism prosecutions. When someone like Matin goes to jail for 30 years, that sends a signal to the public that this person was uniquely dangerous.
FADEL: You talk about the appeals on some of these cases, where the judges think, well, they did this bad thing, and now they're being punished. And they've been held in solitary, and they haven't been treated very well. And so how can we not be sure that they'll come out and not hate America more and do it again? And it becomes a sort of cycle.
ALI: Yes. It's kind of an almost Kafkaesque legal system because a lot of judges were so afraid. You know, understandably so, the entire public and the government was afraid of another terrorist attack.
FADEL: Yeah.
ALI: But the way the judges have justified putting people in prison is by saying, we don't know if solitary confinement or decades in jail will make them more radical, and therefore, we need to keep these defendants in prison for longer. And with that logic, no one can actually win their freedom.
FADEL: That way of thinking - what does it end up doing, then, to American Muslim communities?
ALI: I mean, after 9/11, one of the things that happened was that it basically swept up almost all the Muslim community in the United States under this gaze of suspicion from the FBI, from the police departments, but also from neighbors. We're also seeing this Islamophobia play out against candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, who is running for Senate. We saw it against Zohran Mamdani. During his campaign, 9/11 was evoked over and over again, suggesting that he would be detrimental to New York. And it is astonishing to me that politicians can regurgitate such anti-Muslim sentiment, and there's very little cost to them peddling this vitriol.
FADEL: And the president posted a photo of himself with Melania side by side with a photo of El-Sayed and his wife, Sarah Jukaku, with the caption, two very different Americas.
ALI: Yes. He did. I do think that we live in two Americas now, where one part of the United States would see that photo of Abdul El-Sayed and his wife and think, this is terrible. I don't want to live here. I don't want people like that in this country. It's also worth noting that Abdul El-Sayed's wife wears a hijab. There's also another part of the country that says, this is wonderful. This is diversity. This is what it means to live in the United States.
For so long, there has been a narrative that Muslims are different that has been peddled from the left and the right. But I do think that's shifting in pockets. I do think that, for example, the political excitement among Muslim New Yorkers has really shown what can happen when you engage Muslims politically. But I will say that nationally, that reckoning has not quite happened, and I think it won't happen until Americans start seeing Muslims as a part of this country.
FADEL: Rozina Ali is a journalist and contributing writer at New York Times Magazine. She is the author of "Seasons Of Fury: Four Families And The Rise Of Islamophobia In America." Thank you, Rozina, and congratulations on your book.
ALI: Thank you so much.
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