In her book, Lori Peek chronicles the experiences of Muslim Americans in the weeks and months that followed the attacks of September 11, 2001, as they suffered, made sense of, and responded to a large-scale public backlash. One of several recently released books that address this topic, Behind the Backlash is distinctive in the careful attention Peek gives to the voices of her 140 interviewees and in her effort to explain the development of the backlash itself from the framework of disaster studies. She situates the backlash response—the scapegoating and discriminatory actions of individuals and governmental agencies—at the intersection of four overlapping conditions: the spectacular scale of the attacks; the history of US interventions in the Muslim-majority world and the climate of hostility this has generated in these areas; the greatly increased visibility (and thus vulnerability) of Muslim Americans; and the “heightened sense of threat” (p. 175) many Americans attributed to Islam and to their Muslim conationals. Finally, she asserts that Muslim Americans were excluded from the strong exhibition of national solidarity, collective grief, and “therapeutic recovery” (p. 176) that other Americans utilized to make sense of the disaster. This exclusion, she argues, should be seen not as a by-product of the backlash but as a driving force behind its longevity and depth.

A sociologist interested in disaster research, Peek was curious about the nature of the 9/11 attacks as man-made and thus distinctive from natural crises like earthquakes or hurricanes. The rapid scapegoating of Muslims inspired her to quickly organize a research agenda and travel to New York City where she began interviewing people only three weeks after the attacks. During the next two years, she spoke with 140 Muslim Americans, mostly in New York, predominantly female and young, and predominantly of immigrant backgrounds (Arab and South Asian). Peek's primary research method—interviews that lasted from one to four hours collected in a snowball sample and conducted very soon after the attacks—was augmented by focus groups, but ongoing contact with these informants after the most intense period of anti-Muslim hostility subsided was limited. The time frame of these interviews accounts for both the greatest strengths and weaknesses of the book.

The author does an excellent job of documenting the experiences of Muslim Americans in the immediate post-9/11 environment, especially those from New York City, whose exposure to the backlash was frequently more intense than that experienced at a greater distance from Ground Zero. The two most effective chapters, “Backlash” and “Repercussions,” detail the climate of fear that descended on Muslim Americans after the attacks and the initial strategies pursued by Muslims as they sought to deflect hostility, largely through efforts to educate Americans about Islam and to protect Muslim claims on public space. Peek's subjects articulate a wide array of experiences, both positive and negative, illustrating the frenzy and the creativity that shaped Muslim life in 2002 and 2003 as people sought to make sense of their new status. She is careful to situate the backlash in a history of targeted hostility to Muslims in the United States, devoting a full chapter to this background from the perspective of her informants.

Yet for a book published in 2011, when bookshelves are already full of related work, Peek's assertion that her study is longitudinal is not convincing. Her chapter “Adaptations” remains oddly frozen in the pre–Iraq war period (2001–3). The pressure that Muslim communities and institutions faced as the decade proceeded—pressures imposed on Muslim Americans by an overreaching and ever-expanding security apparatus—is catalogued, but not explored with any critical apparatus. Islamic charities were investigated, their assets frozen, their employees intimidated, and several shut down. Mosques are now subject to investigations that rely heavily on informants and agent provocateurs, generating media headlines and feeding the impression that mosques are zones of suspicious political activity. These developments are key facets of the backlash, which Peek acknowledges but cannot explore because her data were collected so early in the period. Understanding the near aftermath of the 9/11 attacks is a legitimate goal, but trends that have materialized over the last seven years are essential to her interpretive agenda. Because these trends have been incorporated in more recent research on the post-9/11 era, their absence gives the book a dated quality that is unfortunate.

Peek asserts that the field of disaster studies provides a revealing framework in which to analyze the post-9/11 backlash, but she is not quick to apply a disaster model to the data she collected for this book. Only in her conclusion does she develop a schema to account for the severity of the backlash, at which point her analysis is rushed and the conclusions are all too familiar. Perhaps this is because the focus of her research is on the victims of the backlash, rather than on the individuals and institutions that implemented the constellation of anti-Muslim policies and actions that followed the 9/11 attacks. She reminds us that Muslim Americans were excluded from the collective grief that followed the 9/11 attacks, that Muslims bore the brunt of public anger and fear, and that public opinion cast them on the wrong side of the “us/them” dichotomy that has shaped American political culture for much of the past decade. These observations add weight to the conclusions drawn by many other scholars.

Behind the Backlash will be of greatest value to readers who want to understand the 9/11 attacks as a disaster with distinctly negative effects, an approach ideally suited to the early years of the so-called War on Terror. For readers who want to understand the attacks as an act of war and to consider how the ensuing backlash was normalized, ushering in a “state of emergency” that became everyday life, this book has less to offer. For those who want to understand how Muslim Americans have used the 9/11 backlash to refashion their own identities however, Peek's study provides an excellent point of entry into the rich body of scholarship now available on this topic.