Abstract
In Behind the Backlash: Muslim Americans after 9/11, Lori Peek documents and attempts to explain the post-9/11 backlash against the Muslim community in the United States. She conducted interviews with young Muslim American men and women over a period of two years after the terrorist attacks. Peek’s 140 respondents, compiled as a snowball sample, were largely of Arab or South Asian descent, and the majority were either born in the United States to recent immigrants or immigrated to the United States at an early age. Almost all were undergraduate or graduate students, or had recently graduated from college. Most of the sample lived in New York on 9/11, but Peek also drew a small sub-sample from her home state of Colorado.
Peek reports her qualitative data through a series of testimonies and accounts. Many of the respondents expressed feelings of prejudice and discrimination long before the 2001 attacks, recalling harassment from their peers as children and teenagers, often perpetuated by teachers and textbooks propagating ignorant stereotypes about Islam (Chapter Three). However, based on the respondents’ stories, it is obvious that the situation deteriorated after 9/11. Testimonies after testimonies describe various forms of harassment, such as verbal attacks, intimidation, dirty looks, racial profiling, physical abuse, and discrimination from employers, landlords, and educators (Chapter Four). Respondents felt isolated, excluded, and fearful of hate crimes by fellow citizens. They were concerned about government initiatives that could possibly lead to phone tapping, home raids, internment, or even deportation (Chapter Five). However, Peek makes it clear that the respondents did not merely react to the backlash with distress. The discrimination and fear actually led many of those interviewed to feel increased levels of solidarity within the Muslim community, including personal invigorations of their faith, new and closer relationships with other Muslims, and a feeling of duty to represent Islam positively and to educate the public about the religion (Chapter Six).
An interesting point in Peek’s conclusion is the “collective grief” that serves as a catharsis for the members of traumatized communities. The lines drawn between Muslim Americans and the rest of the country after 9/11 made public rituals of communal grief and coping unavailable to Muslims. Peek’s best use of theory can be found in her exploration of the effects of this exclusion. She asserts the key role that disaster researchers assign to empathy, altruism and reciprocity in communities affected by calamity. Drawing on Steffen and Fothergill’s concept of “meaningful therapeutic recovery,” Peek describes the way in which volunteerism works as an outlet for grief and mourning for disaster survivors (p. 176). The respondents felt unwelcome to participate in this societal volunteerism, and therefore missed out on the therapeutic bonding process. She also refers to Kai Erikson’s “collective trauma,” a specific type of trauma that occurs after extreme disasters, afflicting entire communities in a way that is more severe than the sum of the traumas experienced by individual members. Peek draws on this theory to develop the concept of “collective grief,” which is defined by a group of people experiencing grief over the same event (p. 177). Using ideas from clinical psychology to explain this sociological phenomenon, she argues that the most effective healing process for this type of grief is necessarily collective as well. Since respondents felt excluded from the larger community of victims, they were also excluded from the cathartic process of national healing.
Despite these insights, the book lacks an overarching theoretical framework. For starters, conceptual definitions and attempts at theoretical analysis are not even introduced until the book’s conclusion. Peek attempts to explain the unique nature of the backlash in relation to several contributing factors: the intentional and malicious nature of the attacks, the extraordinary magnitude of the losses, the preexisting hostility and prejudice toward Muslims in America, and the “identifiability of the Muslim population” (Figure 7.1). She speaks briefly of the concept of “backlash,” asking why some crises create backlash while others do not and why certain groups are more affected by backlash than others. She refers to the work of Drabek and Quantarelli to explain the fact that catastrophes that are not naturally-caused are more likely to lead people into searching for a scapegoat (pp. 165–66). This assessment comes off as a bit obvious and superfluous. She also invokes the concept of “reciprocal blame attribution,” but fails to illustrate its applicability to the post-9/11 backlash.
Overall, Behind the Backlash is most useful as a compilation of firsthand accounts of young Muslim Americans’ experiences after 9/11. The fact that Peek was able to begin interviewing her respondents so soon after the attacks provides a window into the raw feelings of a population experiencing sudden scapegoating and discrimination and the sometimes surprising ways in which they dealt with and responded to this backlash. Still, it feels as though Peek missed some empirical, and especially theoretical, opportunities. First of all, the description of findings could be greatly strengthened by a more systematic analysis of evidence, showing patterns and trends among the sample overall. Secondly, her sample begs for a reference to the extensive literature on ethnic identity among the second-generation. The sample’s composition also lends itself to a comparison between the experiences of the respondents in New York and Colorado, two settings with substantial differences in terms of Muslim-American population and diversity, but Peek fails to address the effects of context. Lastly, a decade after 9/11, several books and numerous articles have already been published documenting the backlash against Muslim Americans. A further elaboration of the theoretical argument from Peek’s social disaster perspective would have given Behind the Backlash an innovative angle on the crisis and made it a welcome contribution to the literature.