Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter.

“Don’t tell anyone you’re Muslim,” Rozina Ali’s father told her in the aftermath of 9/11. Ali, the author of Seasons of Fury, out now from Crown, was a teenager at the time, living in Central California. Her family, of Pakistani descent, felt excluded from the ability to grieve with the nation as Muslims were singled out, surveilled, and victimized. Ali went on to work at The New Yorker, and she spent years covering the so-called war on terror and the intensified Islamophobia that resulted from it. Most recently, she has been prolific as a contributing writer to the New York Times magazine, winning a National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2023 for her investigation into the disputed adoption of an Afghan child by a United States Marine. In Seasons of Fury, she traces the long arc of Islamophobia in politics and the media. “The War on Terror was a policy decision made by the Bush administration,” Ali writes, “but many journalists, even if subconsciously, treated it as an inevitable order of the world.” 

The book follows four families of different backgrounds, ethnicities, religious practices, and political views. There is the story of a Michigan-born Arab American lawyer and pro-Palestine activist who was surveilled by the federal government long before 9/11. There’s the Pakistani-born family whose son gets ensnared by a police informant and is eventually sentenced to thirty years in prison for conspiring to plant explosives at New York’s Thirty-Fourth Street/Herald Square subway station. There is Ali Chaudry, the small-town New Jersey Republican mayor who goes from being a “reassuring Muslim” to discovering the limits of integration when he tries to establish a mosque. And there is the Palestinian American family who experiences the terror of living next to an Islamophobic neighbor. 

Together, these portraits show that Islamophobia didn’t begin with 9/11, much less with developments to follow. “I actually decided that I wanted to write this book when Trump first became president,” Ali told me. “I kept seeing descriptions of his administration in the news as the most Islamophobic president in US history. It was just astonishing to me that we could just erase that so quickly and focus on Trump as a unique phenomenon.” Her reporting details how a longer history of surveillance, counterterrorism, immigration policy, suspicion of support for Palestine, and pop-culture and media narratives has placed American Muslim life under constant scrutiny. 

One of Ali’s most uncomfortable lessons for journalists is that the press is responsible for helping create this hostile environment, as journalism has for decades reflected the ideas of politicians and the national-security state. “I don’t think the media was a passive actor,” she told me. “It was a perfect storm of things that have been happening over the last forty, fifty years.” In the book, she refers to The Atlantic’s early-nineties Bernard Lewis story “The Roots of Muslim Rage”—with a cover image of a bearded, turbaned man whose eyes reflect an American flag—as an example not only of Orientalism but of a systematic tendency to cast Muslims as fundamentally foreign. The book also presents a serious contradiction: reporters exposed surveillance, questioned government evidence, and documented abuses carried out in the name of national security, while adopting government terminology, giving enormous platforms to bad-faith experts, and focusing disproportionately on violence among the community. 

Seasons of Fury spends a great deal of time on the impact of such devastating and problematic framings—a reality that is all too familiar to Muslims, who don’t need scholars to tell them that terrorism in the United States, despite the widespread violence perpetrated by non-Muslims, has become a Muslim story. Ali points to the Oklahoma City bombing, in 1995, when, before investigators knew anything, news reports suggested that the suspects were two Middle Eastern men and a CBS correspondent said the attack had every single “earmark” of Middle Eastern Islamic terrorism. (It didn’t. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were white American terrorists radicalized not by Salafist interpretations of the Quran but by The Turner Diaries.) Ali also draws on research examining American news coverage of terrorist attacks between 2006 and 2015, which found that attacks committed by Muslims received 357 percent more coverage than attacks committed by others.

Last year, I wrote for CJR about a collective amnesia when it comes to covering the Trump administration and the lack of contextualization of the long history of systematic targeting of Muslims here and abroad. 

As a Muslim Moroccan, I didn’t grow up here, though I experienced American Islamophobia tangentially, through the culture America exported. When I was a child and visiting my family in the US for the summer, I saw Not Without My Daughter, the 1991 film starring Sally Field as an American woman trying to escape Iran with her daughter. I remember being shocked by the Muslims on the screen. They seemed sinister and bore little resemblance to anyone around whom I had grown up. I, like everyone in the world, watched a lot of Hollywood movies and TV series, where Muslims were often the villains, almost always had an accent, and were more often than not a menacing presence. Femicides and gender violence have long been rendered as “honor killings” when they concern Muslims. (Recently, while watching Furious on Hulu, I was pleasantly surprised to see a female character wearing a hijab whose religion had absolutely no significance to the storyline.) 

A year after 9/11, I moved to New York City at eighteen to study. As a woman who doesn’t look visibly Muslim, it was easy. But there were occasional reminders, like when my brother would visit me from abroad and get held for hours at the airport. Then I became a reporter. I was a graduate student in journalism when Barack Obama ran for president and I started looking at how “Muslim” was used as a slur. Much of my career has since involved reporting on what governments do after terror attacks, particularly the securitization that has followed terrorist violence in Europe. I covered how one attack can expand almost immediately into stories about mosques, immigration, headscarves, citizenship, and whether Muslims were sufficiently integrated. I observed how journalism, more often than not, has inflamed the vitriol against Muslims, through the press’s everyday decisions over what is considered news, what events newsrooms choose to cover, and how. Choices of photography, of framing, of narrative have led to equating Islam with terrorism—with danger—and while Muslims have been in the US for centuries, they’re insidiously portrayed as “others.” Muslim reporters and experts, on the other hand, have been largely absent. Mostly, they’ve been interviewed as victims or perpetrators—almost never as figures of authority on the subject. 

“The legacy of the War on Terror is not just the mass arrests and surveillance that swept Muslim communities, or the growing calls for violence against them,” Ali writes in Seasons of Fury, “but also an enduring racism that insists that Islam is too foreign to tolerate.” She explains that one of the consequential failures after 9/11 was when “the media didn’t interrogate enough what the War on Terror meant.” Instead, she observes, “we had this larger framing of US values versus radical Islam.” What got lost, Ali told me, is something more basic: “Muslims are also Americans. Muslims too were victims of 9/11.” She adds that these problematic frameworks still exist today as they are directed at Muslim public figures: “Politicians such as Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed are still interrogated about 9/11, Hamas, or Hasan Piker,” reinforcing “this sense that their religion needs to be emphasized.” Continually invoking 9/11 or groups Americans have been conditioned to see as threatening, she argues, feeds the assumption that “Muslims are dangerous unless proved otherwise.”

I have spent years trying to work against that framing. Most recently, I was the reporting lead on Storytellers, an audio documentary with a simple void to fill: after twenty-five years of extraordinary attention to American Muslims, what remained surprisingly scarce were stories in which Muslims were not being asked to explain terrorism, defend their faith, or perform their Americanness, but were simply telling stories about their own lives.

That experience reflected how complicated it can be to change what journalism considers a story. There’s a genre that has been referred to as the “look at this Muslim eating a cookie” school of journalism: the subject is no longer frightening; now he is charmingly familiar. But the subject is still being asked to demonstrate humanity for an imagined non-Muslim reader. Although I understand the impulse—after decades of distorted representation, there is a huge need for restoring a more ordinary image—this “humanization” genre is in many ways problematic itself. As if journalism needs to prove that Muslims have any kind of humanity. 

I don’t know if Mamdani is committed to the “Good Muslim” media portrayal, but—in the face of obviously bigoted journalism, such as the Wall Street Journal’s recent opinion piece depicting Mamdani wearing a Hamas headband—that’s what it ends up looking like: he has to always be perfect, to never lose his nerve, never get angry or frustrated. He is funny, patient, articulate, and charming, and manages to always reorient the debate to affordability or whatever issue matters most to voters. I admire how savvy he is. I also find it incredibly depressing. I wish he could give a bad interview, be at times irritated—and that the overfocus on his faith could not be a subject of discussion. It isn’t like he has much of a choice. There is subtle pressure on Muslim politicians to continually condemn, explain, and distance themselves from violence and bigotry. Just the other day, we got another example, in a CBS story about El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, which framed his candidacy in the context of 9/11 and included misleading claims about his past views. 

I don’t think journalism needs to replace the Muslim villain with the Muslim hero, or the terrorist with the model citizen. Not every Muslim politician needs to be gracious, good-looking, charming, and perpetually reassuring. Ali chose, in her book, to tell the stories of people who are nuanced, textured, and complex. They don’t have to be exemplary to deserve attention. Or, as Ali writes of the four families her book portrays, “nor are they a statistical norm representing all American Muslims.” Journalism should allow Muslims to exist as individuals and not as what they represent or believe in. 

Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.