I was raised with this consciousness of being part of this global Muslim community. At the same time, I didn't even know if I wanted to be Muslim. It was this incredibly complicated moment: I just needed to balance these two things where you care about people on some deep level who are my co-religion and are being killed because of their religion. Then, at the same time, I'm like ah, I don't really know if I want this.

I think that every individual is a microcosm of the culture that they're born into. They reflect the anxieties, insecurities, and strengths of that culture. I'm also American and I reflect on what it's like to be an American in the 21st century.

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.

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.

The one thing that's missing from the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, and I don't imagine we'll see it any time soon, is that there's no memorial to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who died because of how the memory of 9/11 was used. Memory is a very interesting thing. We very selectively curate our story and then stop when it begins to tell other people's stories and forces us to accept some kind of culpability. One reason I write is that there's not enough Muslims writing, Pakistanis writing, not enough people of faith writing about the complexities of our experiences.

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 are three stories that are foundational to the Islamic narrative in which women, and in two of the three cases, single women, are not just part of the story. They're at the very center of the story. Yet, that is not something that you would imagine to be true if you survey the Muslim world from the outside or from the inside. Part of the reason is that we don't really take our text seriously. We don't take our stories seriously. We're almost afraid of thinking complicated thoughts.