'One minute you're a 15-year old girl who loves Netflix and music and the next minute you're looked at as maybe ISIS.'
The generation born at the time of the 9/11 attacks are turning 18. What has our changed world meant for them?
We now have a generation – Muslim and non-Muslim – who have grown up only knowing a world at war on terror. These young people have been socialised in a climate of widespread Islamophobia, surveillance and suspicion. An unparalleled security apparatus around terrorism has grown alongside fears over young people's radicalisation and the introduction into schools and minority communities of various government-led initiatives to counter violent extremism.
In Coming of Age in the War on Terror Randa Abdel-Fattah, a leading scholar and popular writer, interrogates the impact of all this on young people's trust towards adults and the societies they live in and their political consciousness. Drawing on local interviews but global in scope, this book is the first to examine the lives of a generation for whom the rise of the far-right, the discourse of Trump and Brexit and the growing polarisation of politics seems normal in the long aftermath of 9/11. It's about time we hear what they have to say.
'Randa Abdel-Fattah's compelling work reminds us that the way the global War on Terror has been prosecuted lands like blows across the backs of Muslim communities – it is in the everyday, the mundane, but also in the structures of state. The book should be praised for its depth and breadth of insights into Australia, as we see contemporary Islamophobia in the shade of the War on Terror revealed.' – Dr Asim Qureshi, Research Director, CAGE (UK) and author of A Virtue of Disobedience
'Only someone like Randa Abdel-Fattah with her history as an academic, an activist and a novelist can produce a book like this: analytically sharp, anecdotally rich, politically relevant and beautifully written. Whoever you are, read it and it'll make a better Australian out of you.' – Ghassan Hage, Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory, School of Social and Political Science, University of Melbourne
