Twenty-five years after 11 September, it is hard to separate Islamophobia in America from the shock of that morning, as if everything since was caused by its impact. This is why so many other people have interviewed Rozina Ali this week – even though one of the great accomplishments of her book Seasons of Fury is to show that American Islamophobia took shape long before al-Qaeda, and that it has grown and evolved in dangerous ways because of decisions taken after 2001.

Six months after the attacks, polls showed a quarter of Americans believed Islam was more violent than other religions; by this year, that figure had doubled. This month, in one of the most brazenly racist episodes in recent memory, Zohran Mamdani has faced an organised campaign to ban him from an official memorial ceremony in Lower Manhattan – a kind of chimerical Islamophobia, which casts his polluting Muslim presence at the World Trade Center as an Islamic conquest of sacred American territory.

Seasons of Fury is an appropriately infuriating book, even for those who lived through the history it patiently reconstructs. Following the stories of four American families across eight decades, Ali shows how the war on terror made American Muslims into second-class citizens. Jonathan Shainin talked to Ali about that history, and about a new generation of politicians, including New York’s mayor, whose identity was defined by the Islamophobia that targeted them.

Jonathan Shainin: At the end of Seasons of Fury you write: “This book began as a question: Why were more Americans suspicious of Islam sixteen years after September 11 than they had been immediately after the attacks?”

Rozina Ali: I set out to tell a story about Islamophobia, but I realised that I was actually telling a story about what happened in America.

First, an enormous amount of money was thrown at the war on terror, which funded a vast expansion of policing and surveillance – but also created a world of pseudo-scholarship and ‘terrorism experts’.

I thought I was going to start the book with September 11, but something that surprised me was how bound up the entire project of fighting terrorism was with the conflict in Israel-Palestine. The American conception of ‘Muslim terrorism’ has, from the first, taken its cue from the Israeli state’s conception of “Palestinian extremism.”

When you put these two themes together, you begin to see how the rise and normalisation of Islamophobia is intertwined with a rightward shift and increased militarisation in the US. One relies on the other. 

I lived through most of these events, but I still found it shocking to see all this history gathered in one narrative. There is a patient accumulation of detail that becomes overwhelming and also infuriating. It struck me that you were effectively charting the way Muslims were remade as second-class citizens in America.

Yes, that is a fair description. But it’s important for us to be precise. Forget about the hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslims deported after 9/11 even though they’d done nothing wrong. Forget the launch of a national Muslim registry. What was happening in courts, and in prisons, was the creation of a parallel justice system for Muslims, based on false narratives about terrorism and the repetition of scary words like “Sharia” and “Hamas” – a system that viewed Muslims as uniquely nefarious, treasonous, and ultimately dangerous to Western civilisation.

This system was not set up from scratch: it was built on the existing foundations of anti-immigration and anti-terror laws. But, beginning in the 1990s and then accelerating after 9/11, these laws were put to entirely novel and sinister use. Using secret evidence, vague material support for terrorism laws, and the catch-all phrase of “national security,” courts began convicting Muslim defendants and giving them long sentences – 15, 20, 30 years – even if they had not committed an act of violence. In jail, they were kept in specific units that had been set up for “terrorists” but housed mostly Muslims. In some cases, Muslim prisoners were subjected to long bouts of solitary confinement, cut off from family and friends for years at a time.

The logic of the system can be summed up this way: the US state became very willing to put away Muslims when they were suspected of terrorism, but less willing to help those who were victims of terror. One of the subjects of my book is a Palestinian-American family – I had to give them pseudonyms – who were terrorised by threats from a neighbour for decades, while the state failed to protect them. The threshold to prove someone is guilty of a hate crime is much higher than the threshold to prove someone is planning a terrorist plot.

The second-class status of Muslims became enshrined by the justice system – and, worse, rationalised by much of the media, and the public. Often we hear “Islamophobia is a rational position.” Now we have ended up at a place where it’s acceptable for policymakers to suggest that Muslims should be barred from public office – and from public life altogether. Congresswoman Nancy Mace, for example, recently tweeted, “Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic.”

You’ve covered some of these particular cases as a journalist. Did you have a vision for how taking a longer view of Islamophobia would change our perspective?

At the simplest level, I wanted to stress that history did not start on September 11.

Islamophobia, at least in the US context, is different from other forms of racism and religious bigotry. It has gained traction because it has been a manufactured sentiment – something that was encouraged by policy rather than emerging organically. So the nature of Islamophobia has shifted as state policy shifts: in the 1960s and 70s, Americans were taught to fear Arabs; in the 1990s, to fear Islamic radicals; and, after 2001, to fear Islam itself.

Ironically, a corollary of this is that “American Muslim” has become a coherent socio-political category in a way that was not the case before. In the US there are Muslims from the Middle East, South Asia, eastern Europe, Africa, Indonesia, not to mention Black Americans. Before 9/11, they were largely divided by nationality or ethnicity. After 2001, they were racialized into the larger category of “Muslim”, which also led to a wave of new Muslim organisations, literature, and political leaders. To put it another way, anti-Muslim sentiment is precisely what has made their Muslim identities so salient.

When did an American state policy toward ‘Muslims’ begin to take shape in an identifiable way?

The suspicion of Muslims is ultimately undergirded by concerns about terrorism. I would say the origins of this are in the period after the Six-Day War, after 1967. This is when American involvement in Israel-Palestine began to “come home” – that is, to affect Arabs, including Muslims, living in the US.

Of course Arabs had been living in the US for a long time before that. For the most part they had striven to assimilate into American society, to become Americans, to cast their lot with the American project. The Six-Day War thus came as a rude shock: they were astonished that their government had openly and righteously backed Israel during this conflict that wiped so much of Palestine off the map.

So this prompted a political awakening, and Arab-Americans began organising, as a community, to shift the narrative on Israel, to defend Palestinian rights. And those activities, in turn, led the US state to begin surveilling Arab Americans – in fact, after the 1972 Munich Olympics attack, the government proudly announced it would begin monitoring and investigating Arabs in the US.

So this takes us back to the Cold War, and American foreign policy in the Middle East. Is there a structural relationship between Islamophobia and the expansion of an American empire?

I don't think you can actually talk about Islamophobia without talking about empire – certainly not when it comes to the Middle East. One of Israel’s great achievements, in this period, was to make terrorism into a major concern for US foreign policy.

Until the 1980s, the top security priority for American policy makers was communism, not Islam: Washington even supported the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviet empire. Part of the reason it backed Israel was that Moscow was financing the Palestinians.

Starting in that decade, the US began to shift its attention to the “Muslim World.” There were many reasons for this, including Islamist attacks like the Beirut barracks bombing in 1983 or the first attack on the World Trade Center. But Netanyahu personally deserves significant credit for convincing Washington that the US and Israel had a joint enemy in political Islam.

After the Soviets fell, America was left with a huge military apparatus, and with the sense that it needed to find another global enemy. Islamic terrorism very quickly became that number one enemy – along with the idea that Islamic terrorism wasn’t just a threat to the US, or Israel, but to Western civilisation itself.

Is this when the figure of the Muslim infiltrator – the ordinary Muslim who is disloyal and whose presence in our midst threatens liberal principles – begins to emerge in the public imagination?

One thing that’s fascinating is the way that two very different groups in America – institutionalist, essentially patriotic law-enforcement figures, and rabid professional Islamophobes – arrive at the same conclusion. Which is that Muslim communities in the US pose a danger because there could be radical elements living among them.

During this time, immigration to the US was increasing, and by the mid-1990s, there was a significant enough Muslim population that they were building cultural institutions, creating Islamic groups, and so on. In fact, it reached such a critical mass that a coalition of Muslim organisations put together a national directory – to help people find a mosque or a bookstore in their area. And then the FBI and police – this is before 9/11 – used that same directory to start surveillance in those communities, hunting for anyone connected to Hamas or the PLO.

And then, after September 11, ‘the Muslim’ becomes an alibi for the way the violence of the war on terror also has to operate at home – because these threatening Muslims live among us?

There’s a small but telling example that I mention in the book: in 2004, the California State Senate published a report investigating anti-Muslim discrimination. But in the introduction to that same report, the authors describe the September 11 attacks as having killed “Christians, Jews, atheists and others”, leaving out the American Muslims who were also killed that day. It’s elisions of this kind that helped create a sense that 9/11 was something that “Muslims did to America.”

Even in the run-up to the 2016 elections, when the Democrats were trying to distinguish themselves from Trump’s crude nativism, they took to claiming that they would “welcome Muslims” – as if we were not already American. And then Bill Clinton went further, he said, “If you’re a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror, stay here and help us win and make a future together.”

This is where you see the broader project of empire playing out at home. We can all remember Bush’s infamous declaration: “If you are not with us, you are with the terrorists.” This was a threat to the rest of the world, but it was also a call to American Muslims.

At the same time, after September 11, American Muslims began fighting, for their rights as Muslims – and in recent years, the failures of the US’s war abroad and the mounting failures of domestic policy at home has pulled the younger generation towards progressive politics. The old status quo became untenable; it became very hard for a Muslim American not to oppose empire and American foreign policy more generally. The US was killing a lot of Muslims abroad, after all. And it became all but impossible not to take a stand in defence of the Palestinians.

It’s worth recalling that the state of affairs was very different in the 1990s. Consider Mohammad Ali Chaudry, whose story is in the book. He was the first Pakistani-American to be elected a mayor anywhere in the US, and a member of the Republican party. He could not have cared less about Israel-Palestine, and a figure like that is harder to imagine today. Now the very many Muslims in public office are overwhelmingly progressive, especially on foreign policy, even in defiance of the Democratic Party.

You mention a study about media coverage of the war on terror, which found that “rather than maintain a critical stance against the government, journalists ‘helped brand the policy’ of the fight against terrorism, contributing to the acceptance of it as a ‘fact of life’ and a ‘larger narrative of struggle and heroism’.”

One of the biggest mistakes the media made after 9/11 was not pushing the Bush administration to clarify what it means to launch a war “on terror”. The identified enemy was not Al Qaeda, or even Iraq or Afghanistan, but “terror” itself. What does that mean?

A few scholars questioned this notion – but they were barely heard. On the whole, however, I was shocked by how many very smart journalists, who should have known much better, went along with Bush.

With the media today, I feel we are stuck in two traps. The first has to do with how we talk about “terrorism”. Perhaps the time has come to retire that word. The issue is that “terrorism” has come to imply a grander – and reductively moralistic – narrative about good and evil. Because terrorists are purely evil, anything we do to stop them, even evil deeds, can be justified, even if it’s regrettable. This way you eventually end up justifying a genocide.

The other trap has to do with the way we discuss hate crimes and bigotry – a much smaller issue, but one that gets outsized airtime. When addressing bigotry – whether against Black Americans, or Muslims or Jews, or immigrants or really anyone – the mainstream media takes a curiously decontextualized approach. There is no attempt to connect these events to the rightward drift of the country, or the growth of fascist ideology. As a result you end up in an absurd place where crimes are being tallied, like in an accounts ledger, almost in competition with each other, the implication of which is that various communities are at war with one another, which is both inaccurate and inflammatory.

You’ve talked about how the aftermath of September 11 almost creates a new shared identity for American Muslims, and now 25 years later we have a new generation of Muslim political leaders, who are facing a new wave of Islamophobia, as we have seen this week in New York.

The shameless Islamophobic attacks against Mayor Mamdani are focused on the legacy of September 11 – but the relevant context to understand them is really October 7. I do not think the pitch of slander against him would be this shrill if not for Gaza. Congressman Lindsey Graham, for example, openly said “We are in a religious war.”

But there is a longer history here. The same talking points – “Muslims did 9/11 and therefore they can't be trusted” – were aired during the fight over the so-called ‘Ground Zero Mosque’. And they worked! Mamdani is not going to give in, but he also surely knows the attacks are going to last for a very long time.

You've said recently, in recalling your experience of September 11, that you still believed in American exceptionalism when you were young. What was it like to unlearn that, as a journalist, a Muslim, and an American?

My family had migrated from Pakistan to a small and quite poor town in Central California, and even at a young age I could see there was a big class difference, the poverty didn't make sense to me. But I didn't think of that as separate from American ideals of justice and democracy.

The war on terror changed that. That was when I stopped believing in American exceptionalism. I vividly recall how Americans cheered as they watched the footage of bombs falling on Baghdad. I thought: no, there is something deeply wrong here. It's hard for me to believe a country that upholds democratic ideals would behave this way.

In a sense, my entire journalistic career is an attempt to make sense of that feeling, to critique America not just for the sake of it, but for failing to uphold the values it claims to uphold. I want to show that these are decisions we've made along the way – that we choose to do this. What gives me hope now – a hope I’m just beginning to have again – is that I misunderstood these American values when I was younger; they are not innate, they depend on the kind of society we want to build. Nothing is fated, nothing is written. But for that to change, we have to contend with the ways in which America has broken down.