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.

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.

What I want is to talk about how someone raised Muslim struggles with the same stuff that everyone else theoretically could. Obviously, the particulars are different, but everybody can sympathize with being forced to answer for their identity, the colour of their skin or their religion. A lot of people struggle with mental illness or romance or failed marriages - these are all parts of my own struggle. I read them through the lens of Islam because that's the particular language I grew up in, but the grammar is universal.

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.

There are times when I think being bipolar gives me the ability to see and want and write things that other people cannot and do not. One of those is writing. Creativity is something that co-presents with bipolarity. There are other times when being bipolar legitimately sucks and leads you to a point where you want to kill yourself. Very odd thing when your brain which, evolutionarily speaking, should want you to survive is telling you to die.

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.