Coming of Age in the War on Terror – Abdel-Fattah Randa

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