27 September 2023

Coming of Age in the War on Terror

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Reviewed by Rama Gaind.

By Randa Abdel-Fattah, NewSouth Publishing, $34.99.

Some personal descriptions cut to the core. Statements like … “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.” Or this one that’s confronting:

“I was born on 11 September 2002

First anniversary of 9/11

No one in my family forgets my birthday

because no one in my family forgets 9/11.”

— Aisha (17, Afghan-Australian, Muslim)

With her background as a scholar, award-winning writer and activist Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah effectively undertakes an ambitious project, with extensive research, that’s part-cultural memoir, part-empirical research essay and part-historical evidence.

In Coming of Age in the War on Terror, she has assembled an incisive, probing and intensely affecting record of the traces – the fragments of race and Islamophobia – left on Muslim and non-Muslim youth growing up in a post-9/11 world.

That generation is now coming of age and the book questions the impact of all this – and surveillance and suspicion –­ on young people’s trust towards adults and the societies they live in and their political consciousness. It gives voice to a generation of young people impacted by the war on terror.

Drawing on local interviews but global in scope, this book examines the lives of a generation for whom the rise of the far right and the growing polarisation of politics seem normal.

As Randa points out, this book is not a chronology of political flashpoints in the years since 9/11. Rather, it’s an attempt to unpack the social history, the structure and assemblage of common-sense ideas, myths, values, beliefs, maxims and assumptions about the war on terror that the students I interviewed have grown into and with.”

In the first half of the book, she introduces you to some of the young people she met – the issues that matter to them, the questions that engage them, their fears, dreams and hopes. The practical ideologies of the war on terror – and more – are apparent in the young people’s voices and speak to the particular context in which they have come of age.

She then goes on to consider why these issues matter to the young people she interviewed when conducting her doctoral fieldwork. Dr Abdel-Fattah offers a close and critical reading of certain ‘countering violent extremism’ policies, political practices and moments of media coverage to set up her analysis.

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