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.

After September 11 there was feeling obligated to respond, and allow other people to set the terms of the conversation. There was this ritualistic condemnation of terrorism. I'm not saying that that's unimportant, but it became the case that the Muslim people in the United States or in other parts of the world were inclusively taking on responsibility for things that they had nothing to do with. Of course, it's very important that a community define its moral boundaries. A community also must acknowledge what it can and cannot control.

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.

The Transportation Security Administration has probably converted more people to Islam than any religious order in the last 100 years. It doesn't matter how you choose to self-identify or even if your religiosity is private; when you get to the airport you know how you're going to be treated based on your name. Possibly also because of the colour of your skin and the colour of your passport.

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.

My initial fear was that Trump would be something in the order of an American fascist, be militaristic and aggressive. My take on it after the first 100 days is that he's dangerous in a different way. Fascists are dangerous because they're competent people. Trump is incompetent. My fear is not just as an American Muslim, although that's part of it, but as an American who believes very strongly in the idea of a pluralistic, cosmopolitan, transatlantic Western identity. What he's doing to the West and the United States, I don't think the U.S. can recover from this.

There are companies like Facebook that wield tremendous power over how Americans understand the world. Do they have a social responsibility now? That's the question we're only beginning to ask. Literature still has this power to do things that other forms of media don't have. The process of reading and writing and having arguments about ideas is valuable. I'm afraid it's something we're losing.