It is no secret that across the United States, practitioners of the Muslim faith have been harassed, arrested and deported, especially after Sept. 11, 2001. Stephan Salisbury, a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, spent the past decade documenting the breadth and depth of the domestic campaign against Arabs, the overwhelming majority of whom are here legally.

He builds his angry, disturbing narrative, "Mohamed's Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland," around the May 27, 2004, raid of the Ansaarullah Islamic Society, a Philadelphia mosque. Law enforcement agencies arrested the mosque's founder, Mohamed Ghorab, who had left Egypt with the expectation of finding religious tolerance in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Salisbury is a skilled investigative journalist, so the book rests upon a solid foundation of facts. But he is more ruminative and more directly outraged than many other investigative journalists who mask their feelings in the books they publish. Over and over, Salisbury rightly criticizes federal, state and local law enforcement agents who see potential Arab-American terrorists everywhere they look, who assume guilt rather than innocence, who wrench law-abiding individuals from their loved ones without explanation, who call themselves patriots but violate the very legal safeguards that separate the United States from so many repressive police states.

Throughout the book, Salisbury harks back to his student protester days at Columbia University. During the late 1960s, he and other students angry at the U.S. government assumed they were being monitored by law enforcement agencies, including the FBI. It turns out that the students were correct in their assumption. Salisbury is sensitive enough to know that he and his fellow protesters suffered much less severely than Arab-Americans like Ghorab four decades later. Still, Salisbury cannot put aside the creepiness he felt operating under surveillance simply for voicing opinions critical of his government; he uses his emotions from an ugly era to find common ground with persecuted so-called terrorists today.

Law enforcement agents who state that they need harsh policies and laws to repair and preserve a damaged nation in the wake of 9/11 are not being candid with taxpayers who underwrite their budgets, Salisbury complains. "The more I considered Ansaarullah and other similar situations across the country, I began to realize that the toolbox held instruments of demolition; what is labeled repair is, in fact, a dismantling. A once-thriving mosque in Frankford Valley, gone; Pakistani stores on Coney Island Avenue, Brooklyn, or South Seventh Street, Philadelphia, vacant; an Islamic school in Lodi, not built, and the surrounding community fearful and withdrawn."

It will be interesting to see whether Salisbury's impassioned exposé will lead to less harassment of Arab-Americans across the United States. If his book and other documentation fail to make a difference, U.S. citizens in every locale, of all nonmainstream religious and political persuasions, might find intolerance and due process of law violations spreading into their own lives.

Steve Weinberg is a biographer in Missouri.