Jasmin Zine. Under Siege: Islamophobia and the 9/11 Generation

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/reorient.7.2.0222
• Published date: 14 December 2022
• Date: 14 December 2022
• Pages: 222-224
• Author: Naved Bakali

www.plutojournals.com/reorient

BOOK REVIEWS

Jasmin Zine. Under Siege: Islamophobia and the 9/11 Generation.

Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2022.

$37.95 CAD. 260pp. ISBN 9780228011194

By Naved Bakali, University of Windsor

Jasmin Zine’s work, Under Siege: Islamophobia and the 9/11 Generation is a

comprehensive study, examining Canadian Muslim youths’ experiences in the

post-9/11 era and in the aftermath of the global War on Terror. There are a few

other books which have examined Canadian Muslim youth experiences with

Islamophobia, race and racism in the post-9/11 context (Bakali 2016; Nagra 2017).

However, this work differs in two crucial ways from previous work in the field. In

this study, Zine engages in a comprehensive study speaking with 135 participants

over a span of six years in numerous Canadian cities across Canada. Most previ-

ous studies have examined this phenomenon on a smaller scale and have limited

participants to two to three major Canadian cities. In this way, Zine’s study pro-

vides more depth and nuance to build upon and inform the existing literature in the

field. As such, it is not a stretch to say that this book is the most comprehensive

study to date of Canadian Muslim youth experiences with Islamophobia since the

onset of the War on Terror.

Zine’s opening chapter lays out the premise of her book, namely that young

Muslims (in this study the focus were Muslims between 18 and 26) at the time of

9/11 have had experiences that were uniquely impacted by this event. As such, this

demographic represents a unique “generation”. The essence of their experiences

can be encapsulated by feelings of being “under siege”. This entails being hyper-

vigilant of their “Muslimness” in public spaces, having to be in a constant spot-

light, where they need to be representative voices of their faith, experiences of

bias, prejudice, racism, and being associated with oppression, backwardness, and

terrorism. The opening chapter does a good job of outlining key events in Canadian

history, which demonstrate systemic forms of Islamophobia prevalent in Canadian

society. Though these events could have been connected to deeper historical roots

to race and racism in Canadian history, through conversations about displacement

and genocide of Indigenous communities, residential schools, the Chinese Head

Tax, and other instances; Zine limits her discussion to concrete and specific forms

of systemic bias perpetrated against Muslims within the last twenty years. This

conversation, though extremely insightful and important for providing a founda-

tion for the discussions of experiences of Islamophobia in the post-9/11 era in later

chapters, could have been enhanced by making these connections to Canada’s

DOI:10.13169/reorient.7.1.0222