I have no expertise of other religious traditions so I'm not going to opine on them, but in Islam the more you know about the religion, the more likely you're going to go to hell. Many people will find that paradoxical because we tend to think of religion as a way of making ourselves feel better and a way of damning and excluding infidels or reprobates or heretics or what have you. It was very hard for me to find an Islam that belongs to me and doesn't feel like it's been imposed on me.

There is a dearth of imagination and I think that's an understatement in a modern Muslim world. There is very little willingness to imagine different modes of existence and difference types of societies. On the American front, a lot of Muslims ask me, how do we respond to Islamophobia? What I say is, when you love someone or you love something, you put that thing or that person ahead of yourself. If you love America, then you put America ahead of yourself and you answer the question about Islamophobia, not in terms of how it affects you as a minority, but how it affects America at large.

If you are an American Muslim, you live in a community that is really struggling to get its feet off the ground. We're a very young community, so to speak, institutionally and otherwise. The way in which we're portrayed it's like we're the empire from Star Wars and the truth is that we'd be lucky to be the Rebel Alliance.

Humour is a way of relating and connecting to people, especially when you're a minority or misunderstood. It has the power that other forms of conversations or writing don't have. With all the problems I had, sometimes the only way of coping with it is to make fun of yourself.

I'm looking at my window right now and it's a perfect blue sky. And if you ask people about Sept. 11, the one thing they'll tell you is how serenely, awesomely, perfectly blue the sky was. The juxtaposition of how the day began and what happened is jarring even now.

I think growing up, we always try to make sense of who we are, what we go through, and I grew up in a very religious household. I interpreted what was wrong with me through religious language and I concluded, probably because of a combination of forces around me, that there was something in me that God didn't like or was unhappy with. Since these problems were in large part congenital, that meant that I was doomed from the beginning. I didn't have a chance.

It's been nineteen days since I've had a suicidal impulse. One of the things that pulls me back is I think to myself, and as a Muslim, I believe that God created everything and intended everything and here we are in this unbelievably vast universe that's billions of years old. And yet, here I am, an individual human being, in a little corner of the galaxy and planet that is remarkable in some ways and unremarkable in others. All I wish is to say that He meant for every single person who's ever lived to live. I don't necessarily understand why but that was His choice and here I am.