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Behind the Backlash: Muslim Americans after 9/11, by Lori Peek. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2011. 214pp. $27.95 paper. ISBN: 9781592139835.
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...