If you want to really deeply touch the viewer or the reader, the theater might be the most powerful way to do it.

Here's the problem: we are living in a time when the act of reading is changing. The nature of a reader's attention is changing. The capacity for deep literary engagement is changing.

I consider myself to have been formed by a lot of the locutions and aesthetics and principles of the Muslim way of life, and those are an important part of my childhood and my identity.

The Quran is many different things, and we also have to see the Quran almost as a secondary source commenting on the Old Testament.

I don't have an ideal reader. I'm trying to reach something simple and, I believe, universal, in every single person.

I think there is a lot of continuity between the Jewish and the Islamic traditions. We know this historically, though people don't want to talk about that - especially Muslims. There is a common source for both Judaism and Islam, or let's say that Islam finds its source in Judaism. The commonalities of practice and sensibility, ethos and mythos, create a lot of overlap.

I don't feel that as an artist my job is to offer PR propaganda, whether for the good or for the bad.