A sharp, politically grounded work about what it means to grow up Muslim under the atmospheric force of the post-9/11 security state.

Abdel-Fattah follows how the “war on terror” operates through school, policing, suspicion, curriculum, speech, and everyday social sorting. The book is aimed at younger readers, but not in a simplified or padded way; it treats adolescence as one of the key sites where ideology gets naturalised.

Rather than abstracting racism into a moral lesson, it shows how fear becomes infrastructure: how young people are watched, narrated, and managed into symbolic roles they did not choose. That gives it crossover appeal beyond YA or education shelves. It can sit with politics, race, media, and contemporary Australian nonfiction without feeling stranded in any one lane.