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.

Religion has been an important part of my understanding, my inquiry into what it means to be human.

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.

I'm a storyteller. I feel like the issue of discourse is an important one because there's a lot of political and ideological discourse that goes around, and we relate to that on an intellectual level.

I don't want to test that simple sense of being human. I don't want to transform it.