57 pages • 1 hour read
Samira AhmedHollow Fires
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Samira Ahmed
Samira Ahmed is an American author and essayist born in Mumbai, India. Her debut novel, Love and Other Filters was a New York Times Bestseller and established Ahmed as a young adult writer focused on the effects of Islamophobia in the United States. Her second novel, Internment, is set in a near-future America where Muslim Americans are sent to internment camps at the command of an Islamophobic president. Ahmed is a graduate of The University of Chicago, and her novels often reference the city. Before her writing career, Ahmed worked in New York schools as a teacher, non-profit fundraiser, and political campaign staffer.
In her Author’s Note, Ahmed explains how Hollow Fires is based on her own experience with political unrest, racism, and Islamophobia in the United States, and on the experiences of others in her community. Ahmed leverages her background in politics to portray the role of media in American public opinion, and her background in education to show how hate crimes affect modern American teenagers in private and public schools.
Sociohistorical Context: Islamophobia in the 21st Century United States
Following the attack on four United States locations on September 11, 2001, the US Congress passed the Patriot Act, which gave the government sweeping abilities to surveil and detain any person thought to be acting against the United States. The 9/11 attackers were Arab, and so the Patriot Act unfairly targeted Arab American communities in the United States, as well as Muslim faith communities. In the years following the 9/11 attacks, the United States imposed various tracking laws for travelers from countries with high populations of Muslim believers. In response to this government activity, Islamophobic attitudes and actions rose dramatically in the United States. Islamophobia saw a resurgence during the presidential campaign and term of President Donald Trump. Sociologist Craig Considine compiled the following statistics in his 2017 paper, “The Racialization of Islam in the United States: Islamophobia, Hate Crimes, and ‘Flying while Brown’”:
between 2014 and 2016, anti-Muslim bias incidents increased by 65% [...] In 2015, unfavorable attitudes toward American Muslims rose to a high of 67% [...] a large percentage (42%) of Americans believe that law enforcement agencies are justified in using racial profiling tactics against Muslims and Arabs [...] Finally, anti-Islam and anti-Muslim sentiment is more common among Americans who are 45 and older, those who are Republican, and those who are white (8-9).
Safiya and Jawad both reference the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001 and the ensuing rise in Islamophobia. After the threatening letter arrives at Safiya’s mosque, her parents don’t react because “[they’ve] seen worse. They [remember] 9/11” (25). Safiya also references contemporary anti-Muslim activity: “I was here for the first Muslim ban. And the second. And America’s ongoing, relentless wars in the Middle East that started before I was born” (25). Jawad’s family moved to the United States to escape the impact of those wars, as Jawad’s father was able to get a job as a translator for the American military. The present-day of this novel is set in 2023, with Jawad’s murder and Safiya’s investigation taking place in January 2022. The novel was publishing in May 2022 and contains references to anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant crimes in the United States as recent as January 2021.
Ideological Context: White Supremacy and Hate Crimes
White Supremacy is the belief that the white race (fair-skinned people of European descent) is superior to all other races in ability, intelligence, power, and morality. White supremacist beliefs are at the core of movements such as white nationalism, neo-Nazism, and neo-Confederacy. The belief grounds itself in the now debunked theory of scientific racism, developed in the 17th-century, which proposed that fair-skinned European people were biologically superior to people of darker skin tones or people from non-European areas.
In the United States, white supremacy undergirded the argument for slavery before and after the American Civil War, a foundational ideology for the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). In Germany, white supremacy was combined with Aryan nationalism to support the Nazi-led extermination of Black, Jewish, LGBTQIA+, and Indigenous people. White supremacist beliefs also fueled American military conflicts in Vietnam and South Korea, and modern-day concentration camp practices and travel bans.
When a crime is proven to be motivated by bias, whether against race, gender, nationality, faith, ability, or sexual orientation, it is called a hate crime and may result in additional sentencing. Violent acts committed by white supremacist groups, when charged, may be additionally charged as hate crimes, if the prosecution can prove motivation. In Hollow Fires, Nate and Richard’s online activity on white supremacist message boards, and Nate’s journal entries explaining why they targeted Jawad and Safiya, prove that their actions were motivated by bias, and so their sentence also carried the hate crime charge.
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