Growing up in the early 2000s in California, surrounded by piles of history books about the Kennedy family and her Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs, Rozina Ali’s childhood felt idyllic. She and her family had moved from Pakistan to the US when Ali was five years old and ever since she had immersed herself in her new world.

“I really, really also believed in American exceptionalism,” said Ali, now a journalist working for New York Times Magazine, in a recent interview with Stateside with Kai and Carter, a Guardian podcast. So when her parents sat Ali and her siblings down in the hours after the September 11, 2001 terror attacks, almost every word coming out of their mouths felt wrong.

“I kept telling my parents: ‘This is America. This is not Pakistan. We are living in the United States of America,’” Ali recalled. “And they kept telling me: ‘This country is at war, and Muslims attacked this country, and we are all going to be under suspicion.’”

It wasn’t until years later, when she was reporting on the impacts of the war on terror on Muslim communities in the US, that Ali would realize how right her parents had been. The result is a book she never intended to write – an ambitious attempt to trace the history of Islamophobia in this country, starting decades before 9/11.

Seasons of Fury, out now, is a chilling tale of suppression and paranoia, which Ali unspools through the stories of four families. One notable profile follows Abdeen Jabara, an Arab American lawyer who, in the 1970s, uncovered one of the largest government surveillance efforts in US history. Jabara would eventually become known as the first American citizen surveilled by the National Security Agency. Ali’s book also explores the nuanced experiences of Muslim men who were convicted of terrorism in the wake of 9/11.

Ten years since she first began her research, Ali says Islamophobia in the US feels more present than ever.

A May 2026 poll conducted by Pew Research Center found that most Muslims report feeling discrimination in their daily lives. And that perception is not unfounded. In the 25 years since 9/11, Pew found that the percentage of US adults who said they believed Islam was more likely than other religions to promote violence has more than doubled. As the anniversary approaches, tens of thousands have signed an online petition telling New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who is himself Muslim, to “Stay Away.” Some states, including Texas and Florida, have recently classified the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a longstanding Muslim civil liberties organization, as a terrorist organization.

Carter Sherman, co-host of Stateside With Kai and Carter, spoke with Ali about why she believes Islamophobia is more pervasive than ever – and what this means for our politics right now.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Watch the Stateside podcast episode in full here.

CS: We are talking just days ahead of the 25th anniversary of 9/11. I’m wondering, what do you remember of that day?

RA: I was a teenager the day that 9/11 happened. I was living in a small town in California, and my family was one of, I want to say, three or four Muslims living in this town. Because it was in California, I was still waking up and getting ready for school. I just recall my parents being paralyzed in the living room, watching the news. There was a level of fear in them that I hadn’t really noticed before.

How do you think the days and months that followed 9/11 changed your relationship to the US?

I really believed that the US government would protect the very fundamental pillars and values that it believed in, which was freedom of religion, tolerance, pluralism and first and foremost, freedom of speech. It took me a long time to understand that things that my parents had gone through in Pakistan or things that happened abroad could also happen here. I don’t think I fully, fully registered their fear and how not paranoid they were until I actually started reporting on the stories.

After 9/11, what were the main ways that we now know the US government was interacting with Muslim communities?

Law enforcement, FBI agents, police departments – they were undercover informants. They surveilled not just Muslim neighborhoods, but sat in cafes. They sat in mosques. They spoke to people trying to goad them into plots. It did not matter if you were guilty or not. You know, one of the most popular refrains that I kept hearing over and over and over again in my interviews was, the walls have ears. So many Muslims had that same reaction, that someone was watching us.

As obviously pivotal as 9/11 was, I think your book really illustrates how Islamophobia has been growing into a political tool in this country since the 1960s. Can you walk me through some of the bigger inflection points in that history?

One big one is the 1967 Israel-Arab war in which Israel took over a lot of Palestinian land. That war galvanized the Arab American community living in the United States. There were protests on the streets. There were fundraising campaigns to help Palestinian refugees. It was actually quite remarkable, this level of political activism.

What was also happening was that globally, Palestinian militant groups were becoming more violent against not just Israel, but also western assets and western allies. One big event was the 1972 Munich Massacre in which Black September, a Palestinian militant group, kidnapped and killed the Israeli Olympic athletes. Immediately after that, Nixon’s White House launched a surveillance program against the Arab American community living in the United States. It was ostensibly targeting Arab immigrants, visa holders, but it eventually also targeted US citizens of Arab heritage, including one of the main characters in the book, Abdeen Jabara, who was surveilled not just for months, but for years, and eventually became the first US citizen to be surveilled by the National Security Agency.

The first US citizen?

Yes. At least the first that the NSA has acknowledged.

I think that bringing up the 1967 war is really interesting. One of the threads in the book that you bring up a lot is how the United States’ growing relationship with Israel shaped political attitudes towards Arabs in the United States.

Absolutely. There was this point in which Arabs became racialized in the United States, and that really has to do with the Israel-Palestine conflict. The lens through which the US has seen Palestine and eventually Muslims has been national security. So when we talk about the surveillance that happened after 1967 and we talk about surveillance of Muslims that happened in the 90s as well as after 9/11, they’re all seen through the lens of national security and terrorism. That is a common thread that has not just connected this larger history, but also rationalized this growing Islamophobia that we see today. There is no way to contend with Islamophobia in this country if we don’t contend with our policy towards Israel-Palestine.

It seems like the US government was targeting Arab Americans and then that targeting expanded to encompass all Muslims. How did that happen?

The 80s was a really interesting time.

For many reasons outside the scope of this conversation. Leg warmers, for instance.

Yes, many many reasons. Maybe the best decade, who knows. But a strange decade, nonetheless.

After the Soviet Union fell, the biggest enemy that the US believed it faced was Islamic terrorism. Granted, this did not come out of nowhere. There were actually attacks by Islamic terrorists against the US. But what the US did do was start thinking of terrorism as an abstract idea. That actually goes back to Israel and Netanyahu himself, who really insisted and encouraged this idea of terrorism, not as a tactic that groups used or even states used, but as an end unto itself – that militant groups did terrorism because they were evil. After the Soviet Union fell, as this definition of terrorism became more broad, what we saw in the 90s was this conflation of terrorism with Islamist groups. I remember speaking with one former FBI agent who was actually a police officer in 1995 after the Oklahoma City bombing, and he told me that he was taking a master’s program in national security threats and learning about the term jihad. When the OKC bombing happened, his first thought was, “Oh, this is probably the Muslim terrorists.”

It was not. It was a white guy.

It was a white guy who was an army veteran. But that response was not uncommon. Actually, a lot of media outlets immediately said this looks to be the work of Arab terrorists or Middle Eastern terrorists. There was already a narrative brewing by the mid-90s that suggested that if there is going to be terrorism in the United States, it’s going to come from Muslims. This was the same lens through which the Nixon administration had viewed possible threats coming from the Arab American community. But by the 1990s, the US government thought those threats would come from the much broader Muslim community.

There are various reasons for that. One is because political Islam was rising; people were becoming more visibly Muslim in the United States. Also, the 1990 immigration law actually allowed a lot more immigrants to come into the United States, many of whom were Muslims. At the same time, Muslims were really strengthening their political voice and their social voice. Even though Palestine as an issue might have died down for the American public at large, a lot of Muslim communities were fundraising for Palestinians abroad. All to say that Palestine has been a throughline, even in the 90s.

Now that you have charted out this history of Islamophobia, where would you say we are today with Islamophobia?

Ten years ago, when I even got the seeds of this book idea, I thought I was going to write something that was looking back in history. I am astonished today to be living in a world in which the vitriol against Muslims is not just accepted, but is so violent and so aggressive. And it is so widespread.

Florida and Texas have both designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations as a terrorist organization. What does that move signal to you?

Cair remains a significant institution in American Muslim life in the sense that it is not just nationwide and massive, but it helps protect Muslim rights. It helps record hate crimes against Muslims and Arabs. I always thought that at some point the US government and Cair would reconcile, but these moves by Texas, by Florida, really suggest to me that they are trying to push out Islamic institutions like Cair and really trying to vilify them, to shut them down.

How do you think Islamophobia is playing into politics now, particularly when we look at the rhetoric employed against a new generation of Muslim politicians such as Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed?

RA: It is incredible that the rhetoric really harkens back to a time of suspicion of Muslims after 9/11. This idea that [Abdul El-Sayed] might have terrorist affiliations, which is exactly what law enforcement was worried about regarding Muslim communities [in the 90s]. Or that he has nefarious aims, which is exactly what anti-Muslim hate groups were saying back in 2009, 2010. Islamophobia has become a feature of American politics.

Why do you think Islamophobia is so bad at this moment, so pervasive and out in the open?

RA: I think there are a lot of factors at play. After 7 October [2023], we saw the US give full-hearted support to Israel as it basically committed genocide in Gaza. That led to not just outcry among Muslims and Arabs, but also a lot of the wider American public. Political opinion and public opinion on this has shifted dramatically in the last two years. What happened after 9/11 was that there was a merging, a national consensus on our fight against terrorists. The public was behind the Bush administration. The media was behind the Bush administration. We don’t have that consensus today. We actually have a huge gap between public opinion on this matter and what policymakers are doing and saying [about Israel’s war on Gaza]. At the same time, we are seeing a rise of Muslim policymakers in this country. This is creating a perfect storm in which, because there isn’t really that much to push back on – even the progressive policies that Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani espouse are backed by the American public – what is being used is racism and Islamophobia. I think it has become a weapon.

So many of the tools that were created in the wake of 9/11 to target Muslims, like the Department of Homeland Security itself, are now being used against other groups of people too, like Latino immigrants. What has it been like for you to see these tools expanded and deployed this way?

RA: It’s chilling but not shocking. I think any civil rights lawyer and any activist who was paying attention to how these laws were being used against Muslims knew immediately that this was going to happen. It’s not just that these laws are in the books and are able to be used so readily but also they’re effective because our definition of terrorism has expanded so much. When the Bush administration launched its “war on terror” it did a very, very bad job of actually defining what terrorism was.

Which was: what we were at war against.

Yes. We did not know who the enemy was and so the enemy morphed over the years to become Muslims. But it also morphed into anyone who disagreed with the US government. We kept expanding the authority and the power of the executive branch, and US government to constantly use the phrase national security to justify a lot of things, including eventually in the supreme court with the Muslim ban. What we have now is an executive that has expansive powers. We have a broad definition of terrorism. We have laws in the books that have been fine-tuned, but that are still vague. And we have an administration that has decided that its enemies are leftists, anti-ICE activists, anyone [Donald Trump] considers part of Antifa.

Thirty years ago, we would say we have a crazy president, but at least we have checks and balances. What’s happened over the last 25 years is we have expanded the ability and the authority of the executive branch to launch its “war on terror” abroad or at home.

• Seasons of Fury by Rozina Ali is out now via Crown Publishing Group