‘Seasons of Fury’: new book traces Islamophobia to before 9/11
Journalist Rozina Ali argues that decades of surveillance and national-security policy made Arab and Muslim communities objects of suspicion long before attacks
NEW YORK (MNTV) — Islamophobia in the United States did not begin on Sept. 11, 2001, journalist Rozina Ali argues in her new book “Seasons of Fury,” but grew out of decades of national-security policy and racial suspicion that gradually cast Arab and Muslim communities as threats.
Ali, who moved from Pakistan to California at age five and grew up believing in American pluralism, traces the history through four families, from the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war to the “war on terror” and the present.
A central figure is Abdeen Jabara, an Arab American lawyer who uncovered government surveillance of Arab Americans in the 1970s and was later acknowledged as the first U.S. citizen surveilled by the National Security Agency — evidence, Ali writes, that the monitoring of these communities long predated 9/11.
After 1967, as Arab American activism and fundraising for Palestinian refugees grew, the Nixon administration launched surveillance that expanded from immigrants to citizens, interpreting political activism through a national-security lens.
The attacks then “transformed that suspicion into a vast system of surveillance, policing, and counterterrorism,” Ali writes, with informants entering mosques and cafes and a generation absorbing the sense that “the walls have ears.”
A quarter-century on, she argues, the climate has not faded but grown more politically visible: a 2026 Pew survey found most Muslim Americans report discrimination, and anti-Muslim rhetoric has entered mainstream campaigns, from attacks on Mamdani to Texas and Florida branding the Council on American-Islamic Relations a terrorist organization.
Ali’s deeper warning is that extraordinary powers rarely stay confined to their first targets. Surveillance tools and broad terrorism definitions built to monitor Muslims, she argues, are increasingly turned on other groups — immigrants, protesters, and activists.
“Islamophobia has become a feature of American politics,” she says, and its machinery a template for eroding civil liberties far beyond Muslim communities.
The lesson, she concludes, is that constitutional protections mean little unless they hold for the unpopular and the politically inconvenient.
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