You aim comedy up. If comedy is aimed down, you're a jerk. You laugh at the powerful as a way of bringing them down to your level or bring yourself up to theirs. Donald Trump doesn't actually laugh. I've never seen him do anything other than smirking. He doesn't have a sense of humour. He's just mean.

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.

When I was growing up, we often heard Islam in the form of a slogan: "Islam is the solution," but no one ever told me that Islam can be a burden... Very few Muslims write about Islam creatively because I don't think we're given permission to. I think that's the bane of modern Islam. It's been reduced to slogans.

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.

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.

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.

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.