'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.'
We now have a generation - Muslim and non-Muslim - who has grown up only
knowing a world at war on terror, and who has been socialised in a
climate of widespread Islamophobia, surveillance and suspicion.
In Coming of Age in the War on Terror, award-winning writer Randa
Abdel-Fattah interrogates the impact of all this on young people's
political consciousness and their trust towards adults and the societies
they live in. 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 and the growing polarisation of politics seem normal. It's
about time we hear what they have to say.
'As one of Australia's most compelling cultural critics, Abdel-Fattah
curates a precise and substantive account of the impact of 'terrorist
discourse' on an entire generation. With heartbreaking pathos, she
invites us into the minds and hearts of a generation of thoughtful and
intelligent young Muslim and non-Muslim Australians from diverse social
backgrounds. This ambitious project, comparable in its breadth to
Ghassan Hage's seminal White Nation, is part cultural memoir, part
empirical research essay and part historical record. Excoriating the
hypocrisy of neoliberal social interventionist policies, Abdel-Fattah
has given us a rich and important work, as moving in its sincerity as it
is unprecedented in its scope.' - Daniel Nour, Books+Publishing
'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
'Randa Abdel-Fattah has produced an urgent book for our time. Coming
of Age in The War on Terror is a story of injustice against those who
suffer because of prejudice and manufactured fear. It is a vital work
about us, Australians. This book poses many questions that we must
confront if we are to ever consider ourselves an inclusive society. With
courage, intelligence and acute insight, Abdel-Fattah is asking that we
think and act with thoughtfulness and not ignorance.' - Tony Birch
