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.
Themes
Effects of Islamophobia on Individuals & Communities
The structure of Hollow Fires explicitly highlights the effects of Islamophobia on individuals and communities in the United States. The novel has two named character narrators: Safiya Mirza, a Muslim American teenager whose family is from India, and the ghost of Jawad Ali, a Muslim American teenager from Iraq. Jawad was targeted for murder by two white supremacists because of the notoriety he gained as #BombBoy, the moniker the media gave to him after being falsely accused of bringing a fake bomb to school by his Islamophobic English teacher. Safiya was targeted by the same killers, first in a threatening letter to her mosque, and then directly as she pursued Jawad’s case. The novel depicts the direct violence experienced by its main characters, the media’s reaction to this violence, and the long-term effects of hate crimes on a community.
Islamophobia motivates Nate and Richard to target Jawad, whom they identify because of his arrest and media attention—both of which also reflect overt Islamophobic bias. Jawad’s teacher, Patricia Jensen, sees his jet pack costume made of recycled materials and immediately calls 911: “frantically describing Ali as ‘an Arab student’ who [is] wearing ‘something like a suicide bomber vest’” (7) and saying, “An Arab kid has a bomb. They want to kill us all. Why do they hate us?” (49). His teacher’s Islamophobia leads to Jawad’s arrest, suspension, abuse, distress and the media frenzy that follows. The threatening texts that Nate and Richard send to Jawad before killing him specifically reference #BombBoy: “This is the way the Bomb Boy ends. This is the way the Bomb Boy ends. Not with a bang but a whimper” (23). Even before Safiya begins her investigation, Nate and Richard target her mosque and send their threatening letter. Richard begins strategically flirting with her, trying to get her to trust him. The author includes this detail to demonstrate that Nate and Richard’s primary motivation for attacking Safiya wasn’t her investigation, but their prejudice against her based on her race and religion; they’d begun harassing her even before Jawad’s death.
Throughout Safiya and Jawad’s chapters, Ahmed intersperses interview transcripts, news reports, blog posts, and social media replies discussing the events in real time to show how the media perpetuates Islamophobia in reporting, influencing public opinion. Mainstream reports of Jawad’s arrest consistently refer to him as an Iraqi refugee and an Arab student and use the term “bomb threat,” even though Jawad is cleared and his project is revealed to be clearly a costume. Right-wing and conservative sites take the misreporting a step further, “[showing] pictures of Jawad fist-bumping another brown kid with the chyron TERRORIST FIST JAB?” (47) and claiming his disappearance is “a planned hoax [...] to cry ‘Islamophobia!’ To get sympathy and money from the libs [liberals]” (106). This narrative ensures that investigators consider the case with bias and discourages anyone from the community from speaking up for fear of retaliation. The author emphasizes retaliation as a real concern through Dr. Hardy’s censorship of the school paper and the menacing vandalism left by Nate and Richard on the Mirzas’s store—both responses to Safiya speaking out.
Though Nate and Richard are indicted in the end, their Islamophobic actions, and the biased narrative perpetuated by the media, have long term effects on Jawad, Safiya, and their families. Jawad is murdered, and his parents lives are forever altered. Safiya receives “rape threats [...] death threats” from Richard’s online supporters after his arrest. “It’s a permanent part of me now,” she says, “like a tattoo I never wanted. Like a brand burned into my skin” (390). The author suggests that Richard and Nate’s lawyers are going to appeal their sentencing and may be released early, encouraging their white supremacist supporters, and signaling a possible additional threat to Safiya and her family. Ultimately, the novel demonstrates the direct, violent consequences of Islamophobia on individuals and communities, as well as the ripple effects of this violence long-term.
How Internet Media Empowers Youth Activism
Protagonist Safiya Mirza—the editor-in-chief of her school newspaper, The DuSable Spectator—uses her journalistic skill alongside internet media to pursue justice in Jawad’s case. Through Safiya, Ahmed demonstrates How Internet Media Empowers Youth Activism.
The DuSable Spectator is an online publication, deliverable directly to the personal phones of students and school staff. Safiya’s initial post responding to the swastika painted on the school immediately reaches a wide audience because she’s able to write and publish it online. Though she’s suspended for posting, she shares pictures of the swastika and challenges her classmates to, “bear witness” and not, “let the administration ignore it or whitewash what happened” (74). The author uses Safiya’s communication through the Spectator to foreshadow Safiya and Asma’s use Reddit and #JusticeforJawad once Jawad’s body is found to fight for justice in his case. To keep Jawad’s name in the news, and cast a wide net for new leads, Safiya and Asma create social media accounts tied to #JusticeForJawad, including a Reddit thread compiling all the current facts of the case and asking for any additional information from online users. The rental car tip—the clue that ultimately reveals Richard as one of the killers—comes through an anonymous user on Reddit who works at the rental car shop where Richard and Nate bought the car. The author juxtaposes the success of Safiya’s social media tip line with the inefficiency of the police’s anonymous tip line to show how youth activism can create results where traditional avenues often fail.
Internet media also acts as a paper trail for Safiya’s investigation. Safiya and her friends use Twitter to track Nate and Richard’s white supremacist activity, identify Nietzsche’s influence on neo-Nazism, and scour Nate’s YouTube channel to discover the location of Jawad’s body. After Safiya finds Nate’s glasses, she’s able to contact the eyewear shop in London in less than 24 hours to confirm the glasses’s origin. Safiya leverages technology to find answers and create solutions. The ultimate display of Safiya’s power through internet media is the story itself, which is framed as Safiya’s journalistic account of events, published after the trial.
The Power of Journalism and The Court of Public Opinion
Samira Ahmed organizes Hollow Fires as a frame story. At the time of Nate and Richard’s trial in 2023, Safiya compiles her own journalistic account of the events of Jawad’s death and her own investigation into his disappearance that took place between January 3 and January 20, 2022, providing a frame for the narrative, which includes both Safiya’s first-person account and Jawad’s posthumous one. Additionally, Ahmed includes in-world articles, interviews, news reports, blogs, tweets, and other media to demonstrate the influence of journalism on public opinion.
In Hollow Fires’s front matter, Ahmed provides a “Glossary of Intangible Things,” a list of definitions from Safiya’s perspective of facts, alternative facts, truths, and lies, immediately raising questions of truth and falsehood in reporting, which are concerns for Safiya throughout the novel. In the first chapter, Safiya tells the reader, “lies are what got us here in the first place,” referencing the lie that Jawad made a fake bomb, the lie that Richard cared for Safiya, and the lies about Jawad and the case perpetuated by the media (6). When Jawad was arrested, the media reported him as an “Iraqi immigrant [with] a record of truancy” even though he was an American citizen and his school absences were for a family wedding (15). Social media gave him the name #BombBoy, by which he was addressed (and harassed) at school and by his killers. This false reporting dehumanized Jawad in the public eye, suggesting that his case would have been forgotten had Safiya not published the truth.
Journalism plays an equally powerful role in Nate and Richard’s trial. In contrast to their vilification and dehumanization of Jawad, both conservative media and local news refer to the boys as “brilliant” and “athletic” “fine young men” (360). Social media praises Nate and Richard for their good looks, humanizing them and engendering support. Various twitter users refer to them as “hometown heroes” who were “making our nation great again” (365), referencing specific, conservative political ideology. This coverage attempts to absolve Nate and Richard of responsibility because of their connections, wealth, and appearance, even claiming that their murder of Jawad was heroic. Ultimately, Nate and Richard are convicted, but the author suggests that there could be retaliation against Safiya for this outcome. Radio host Kayleigh Barr tells her audience, “We cannot and will not let a false God and a false justice be served. I’m calling on all 2A Patriots to be ready. Stand back and stand by,” encouraging them to retaliate if Nate and Richard are found guilty (380). Media not only shapes public opinion but encourages and provokes action—often violent action—based on the facts or lies that it perpetuates. Ahmed’s novel provides an implicit challenge for journalists and media platforms to acknowledge the power they wield and act ethically, responsibly and without prejudice or bias.
The Intersection of Wealth and Race in the American Justice System
In her Historical Note, the author references the “affluenza” defense attorney Clarence Darrow used in the trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the two men who murdered Bobby Franks in 1924. In Hollow Fires, Nate and Richard’s lawyers use the same argument: “the two [Richard and Nate] were not able to understand the magnitude of their actions as they were raised to believe their wealth and privilege superseded the law” (381). Their lawyers base their defense on a belief that wealth and privilege are a disease that victimized Richard and Nate, and therefore the men cannot be held responsible for their actions. In using this defense, the lawyers inadvertently highlight the inherent bias towards wealth and whiteness in the American justice system.
Ahmed reinforces the power that wealth affords Nate and Richard when the police dismiss Safiya’s concerns about Nate after the vandalism at the store. The officers hear Nate’s name and assume that he couldn’t possibly have committed a crime; instead, they tell Safiya to move on. Repeatedly, Nate, Richard, and their families and supporters claim that they should not be convicted because of their wealth and status, and that Jawad’s identity as a brown person should make his death less concerning. Nate and Richard both ascribe to Friedrich Nietzsche’s belief that the white race is superior, and Nate’s journal entries reveal that he and Richard want to “wipe out the others, cage them, end them” (376). Even in their police interrogations, both Nate and Richard are condescending and smug, demonstrating that they believe their privilege absolves them from consequences. Only once the jury reaches the guilty verdict does Richard show any sign of fear. Safiya addresses him directly in her description of him smiling “through this entire trial [...] believing so much that you would win [...] you always won, didn’t you? Until you didn’t” (389). Though the boys are convicted for their crimes, their wealth still changes how they experience the justice system. Safiya notes that “the defense lawyers [get] Richard and Nate transferred to the cushiest jail there [is], even with the verdict and the sentence. Money can buy comfort, I guess, if not always freedom” (394-95). Throughout her narrative, Ahmed demonstrates how Richard and Nate’s wealth and privilege alter the way they interact with the American justice system, regularly removing or minimizing consequences.
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