Contemporary Authors

• My First Police State ( travelogue) Xlibris (United States), 2003
• The Order of Light ( novel) Penguin Books (New Delhi, India), 2005

1. My first police state LCCN 2003095668 Type of material Book Personal name Moghul, Haroon. Main title My first police state / Haroon Moghul. Published/Created [United States] : Xlibris Corp., c2003. Description 134 p. : ill., maps ; 21 cm. ISBN 1413425399 1413425380 (pbk.) Shelf Location FLS2016 104483 CALL NUMBER DS208 .M55 2003 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS2) 2. The order of light LCCN 2006346531 Type of material Book Personal name Moghul, Haroon. Main title The order of light / Haroon Moghul. Published/Created New Delhi : Penguin Books, 2005. Description 274 p. ; 21 cm. ISBN 0144000121 CALL NUMBER PS3613.O375 O73 2005 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• How to Be a Muslim: An American Story - 2017 Beacon Press, Boston

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haroon_Moghul

  Haroon Moghul
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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  Haroon Moghul
  Born 1980
  Massachusetts
  Occupation Academic, commentator
  Haroon Moghul is a Pakistani-American academic and commentator on Islam and public affairs. He is the Fellow in Jewish-Muslim Relations at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America[1]. He is also a Contributor at the Center for Global Policy.[2]

  His pieces have been published by numerous websites including CNN, The Washington Post, Religion Dispatches, TIME, Foreign Policy, Guardian and Al Jazeera English. He has been a guest on CNN, the BBC, The History Channel, NPR, Russia Today and Al Jazeera English.[3] He is also a contributor to Haaretz.[4] He has authored or contributed to several works including the The Order of Light and Salaam, Love: American Muslim Men on Love, Sex, and Intimacy.[5][6] His most recent book is How To Be A Muslim: An American Story.[7]

  Personal life[edit]
  Moghul was born and raised in a Pakistani Punjabi family[8] in New England. His father, Dr. Sabir Moghul, is a retired orthopedic surgeon and his late mother was a primary care physician. Both his parents were immigrants to the United States from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. His father's roots are in Rawalpindi and his mother's roots were in East Punjab.[9] He has one older brother, an attorney. He remarried in 2014. He got divorced in 2017 because he cheated on his second wife with Samar Kaukab.

  Works[edit]
  2003 My First Police State
  2006 The Order of Light
  2014 "Prom, InshAllah" in Salaam, Love: American Muslim Men on Love, Sex, and Intimacy
  2017 How to Be a Muslim: An American Story

• University of Southern California - Religion Dispatches - http://religiondispatches.org/author/haroon-moghul/

  RD Senior Correspondent Haroon Moghul is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Policy. He has a Master's Degree in Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies from Columbia University, has appeared on all major media networks, and has also been published at CNN, TIME, Washington Post, Guardian and Foreign Policy. His book is How to be a Muslim: An American Story (Beacon 2017).

• NPR - https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=535757103

  RELIGION
  < 'How To Be A Muslim' Author On Being A Spokesperson For His Faith July 6, 20172:20 PM ET Listen· 36:06 36:06 Queue Download Embed Facebook Twitter Flipboard Email TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. The new book "How To Be A Muslim" isn't a how-to book. It's a memoir by my guest Haroon Moghul. And the title is more of a question than an answer. The question of how to be a faithful Muslim as a first-generation American growing up in a world so different from Pakistan, where Moghul's parents emigrated from. When he was a student at NYU, he was a leader of the university's Islamic center. Because of his position, after 9/11, he was often called on as a spokesperson for the Muslim community. But none of this stopped him from questioning what it meant to be a good Muslim and whether he was capable of being one. He feared that as a spokesperson, he was in over his head. He often felt like a fraud. He was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder. The book opens with him on his way to the bridge where he intended to jump and take his life. Fortunately, something stopped him at the last minute. Moghul is now a fellow in Jewish-Muslim relations at the Shalom Hartman Institute. Haroon Moghul, welcome to FRESH AIR. You've described yourself as having become, in the past, a professional Muslim. What did you mean by that? HAROON MOGHUL: Professional Muslim is kind of like being a firefighter. Every time something bad happens, you're called upon to apologize, to explain. It means that your entire identity is pegged to events in other parts of the world, usually and almost exclusively negative events. And your entire religious life becomes the articulation of why your community is not a problem or should not be perceived as a problem to wider America. In some senses, I see it as a civic responsibility. But in a lot of senses, it's a tremendous burden. It's been pretty hard. GROSS: So do you still think of yourself as a professional Muslim? MOGHUL: My hope is that writing this book is my way of taking that responsibility and going beyond it and becoming someone bigger and better than that because there's so much more to who I want to be as a person and who Muslims want to be. And unfortunately, we're often denied the chance to do that. I actually - I was on a television news program several months ago. I don't remember what exactly was the cause of why I was on but presumably something bad, something to do with terrorism. And I often have trouble asking for things. But this time, I told myself that I would make an ask. And so when the segment was over, I turned to the anchor of the news program and I said, there's lots of other things I'm interested in. I'm interested in health care, infrastructure, science fiction - I'm a big "Star Trek" fan. I'm interested in fantasy and movies and culture and literature and all these different things. And the anchor looked me dead in the eye and said, yeah, that's great, but we're only ever going to call you on when Muslims do bad things. So... GROSS: (Laughter) Nice to know. (LAUGHTER) MOGHUL: It was good to know. It was helpful. Honesty, I suppose, is to be appreciated. GROSS: But you also describe a crisis that you were having earlier in your life, that you were a professional Muslim, but you felt like a fraud. MOGHUL: I grew up in a very religious household and a very conservative household. We were taught and expected to be a certain kind of Muslim, and I never was able to live up to that. And so I had this external feeling of having to be a certain person or at least look like and act like a certain person. And when I found myself in college, I found myself attracted to the idea of a Muslim community and found that I was actually pretty good at building a Muslim community. It was something I enjoyed. It was something that people told me I was doing great work in, while at the same time, my interior spiritual life was sorely wanting. We've reached a point, I believe, in American Muslim communities, where we have a lot more inclusivity and openness to difference. But at the time I was in college, I don't think it was quite where it is now. And so I felt like I was portraying myself as a certain kind of Muslim in order to accomplish certain objectives when I wasn't that Muslim. And so I felt not just like a fraud, I felt like a hypocrite. GROSS: What certain kind of Muslim were you portraying yourself as? MOGHUL: The best answer I can give is an orthodox Muslim, for lack of a better term - someone who prays five times a day, someone who is not dating, someone who is deeply invested in a traditional interpretation of Islam, someone who has no faults or flaws, someone who doesn't question God's actions or purposes in the world - an obedient, typical Muslim worshipper. It's not who I was. I don't think it's who I am. GROSS: I think it's hard to be - maybe I'm just projecting here - that it's hard to be somebody who's, like, highly educated and intellectual and not question everything. MOGHUL: I was also a philosophy major in college, so... GROSS: Oh, forget about it. (LAUGHTER) MOGHUL: ...Probably was not the best choice. Or maybe it was my subconscious trying to tell me something. But yeah, I question everything. That was pretty much what I was majoring in... GROSS: (Laughter). MOGHUL: ...While at the same time, I was acting and pretending like I had never questioned anything. GROSS: So when you went to NYU, you were really active in the NYU Islamic Center. And you wanted to make it a center that would be a bridge for people. And you write, (reading) we didn't have to make people want to go to the mosque. We just had to build a mosque people wanted to go to. So what kind of center - what kind of mosque did you envision that as being? MOGHUL: Mosques can be tremendously lonely, alienating and judgmental places. When I was growing up, mosques were pretty much the reserve of men of a certain professional and ethnic background of a certain sectarian affiliation. The sermons were often barely in English, hardly comprehensible and usually completely irrelevant to the concerns of the time. And I was deeply dissatisfied by that. And when I got to NYU, which - incidentally, I went to NYU because I didn't get into an Ivy League, which my father still holds over my head. But that's what it's like to grow up Pakistani. But when I got to NYU was the first time I'd ever encountered a large group of diverse Muslims. And I thought to myself, wouldn't it be cool if all of us could find a place where we would feel at home, where being Muslim was something that we got to define for ourselves and not have imposed on us from without? And so we set ourselves to the task of building this really cool, this really dynamic and this really fun institution. And I think it took off precisely because a lot of people were invested in their religious identity, but they didn't have a place where they could express it. And unfortunately, when I talk to Muslims - and I travel around the country a lot talking to Muslim audiences - it still seems like that's a pretty big problem, that folks don't have a place where they feel better about themselves as Muslims and not worse, which is terrible in the present political climate because you get attacked by many people on the right for being Muslim. And then you go to the mosque, and instead of being uplifted, you feel crushed or humiliated or simply that your community is inadequate. GROSS: Describe more of the center or the mosque that you created. And should I use those two words interchangeably? MOGHUL: Sure. I mean, it wasn't an ordinary mosque. It was just the equivalent of a Muslim Students Association, a club for undergrad and graduate students. I should be completely transparent, however. The reason I actually first walked into the Islamic Center is because when I got into NYU, they had a student club fair. And the first club I expressed interest in was the South Asian Students Association. And I went to their first dance party of the year. I cannot dance. Watching me dance would probably cause you to lose faith in humanity. (LAUGHTER) MOGHUL: And so, yeah, I basically went to a dance party and... GROSS: I've been tested by worse things (laughter), I assure you. MOGHUL: It's pretty bad. GROSS: (Laughter). MOGHUL: It's really bad. It's amazing that I can't make my body do anything remotely publicly acceptable to music. And I sat in the corner, and I didn't dance. And no girls talked to me, and I didn't make any friends. So I decided maybe I'll try the Islamic Center. And so I joined the Islamic Center because I couldn't dance, which is kind of probably not the ordinary reason people are expecting. And we just wanted to build a community. And we needed to find a place to pray, so we set ourselves to raising the funds necessary to build a space large enough for students to come and worship. We wanted to find a way to express and share our identity. So we put on programs; we produced a magazine. It was very typical stuff for any undergraduate student experience, except that it was in a Muslim language, in a Muslim lens, which was unfamiliar to a lot of people. GROSS: So let me ask you about how sexuality figures into this because one of the turning points in your life, as a boy, was when you were in public school and sex education classes were about to start and your parents sent a letter saying that you needed to be exempted from sex education. And so every time there was a sex education class, you were excused and had to go some someplace else. So everybody knew that you weren't allowed to take it. What was the impact of that on your life as a boy? MOGHUL: I'm actually still laughing at how absolutely absurd this was. It was my first semester, for lack of a better term, in Somers, Conn. We were in fifth grade. And every student took the sex education class - like, every single one as far as I knew except for me. And not only did I not sit in on the class. I was excused from the class. The teacher would simply call on me and say I could leave now, which is, from a - just a 10-, 11-year-old's point of view, absolutely horrible to be singled out. And then I would go to the library. You can't even make this up. I would go to the library where I was doing a report on the solar system. GROSS: (Laughter). MOGHUL: So while my classmates studied human sexuality, I was literally drawing Saturn with colored pencils. GROSS: (Laughter) So - and... MOGHUL: It's kind of amazing. GROSS: You make it sound in the book like this was a real turning point in your life. How do you think that influenced your future sexual life? MOGHUL: I was the only brown kid in my school. I grew up in New England, so I'm not trying to say - I don't want people to misunderstand me. I grew up in a pretty open-minded, very welcoming place. I never encountered any overt hostility. But I was very much the obviously brown kid with the strange name. And then I'm booted out of sex ed, which only added to the taboo of sexuality that I grew up with. I was raised pretty much to believe that at some point my parents would find me a spouse and that in the meantime, I would have no interest in girls or dating or sexuality. And for my parents to then deprive me of sex ed was just one more way in which sexuality became this extremely abnormal, uncomfortable and even, I would say, almost un-Islamic thing. It was for other people. It wasn't for us. GROSS: Let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is Haroon Moghul, and his new memoir is called "How To Be A Muslim: An American Story." It's a memoir. It's not a self-help book giving you advice (laughter) on how to be a Muslim. It's about his life as a Muslim. He's now a fellow in Jewish-Muslim relations at the Shalom Hartman Institute. We'll take a short break and be right back. This is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF RHYTHM FUTURE QUARTET'S "IBERIAN SUNRISE") GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Haroon Moghul. He's the author of the new memoir "How To Be A Muslim: An American Story." And of course this is a memoir about your life as a Muslim, as the son of Pakistani immigrant parents in America. You were a leader of the Islamic Center at NYU at the time of the 9/11 attacks. And as you put it in your book, my country had been attacked in my religion's name. So how did that make you feel like you had to change your role as a Muslim who had an active role in the faith community? MOGHUL: I don't know if this is me or all of us, but I've often felt myself to be torn in half between who I believed I was supposed to be, often through the input of parents and elders and religious authorities, and who I thought I wanted to be, which emerged from within myself. And that cleavage was reproduced in the aftermath of 9/11 - that suddenly there were two parts to me that a lot of people believed were not only incompatible but mutually hostile, that I was an American, and I was a Muslim. And there were a lot of people and probably an increasing number of people who think that that conjunction is impossible. But more to the immediate point, when the attack happened, I had - I was in a place in my life where I thought I would leave the Islamic Center behind because it felt suffocating, and I felt a hypocrite and a fraud. And when the attack happened, I was leader of one of the largest Muslim communities in proximity to ground zero and one of the few that was able to talk to media because it was conversant in English and composed of people who'd grown up here and had the ability to speak to wider American audiences. And suddenly this task of community building and community organizing which was only ever supposed to be for a university campus became part of a national and even international conversation, which I felt I had to do and felt completely and totally unprepared for. GROSS: Let's complicate your story a little bit more. You were diagnosed as bipolar. How old were you when you got the diagnosis? MOGHUL: I was 23 years old. I had just dropped out of law school. And to give you a sense of how traumatic that was, my father had told me that I was not allowed to get married until I was 35 and I had completed medical school and my residency. And by the time I was 35, I dropped out of two graduate schools, and I was divorced. So I guess my father was right (laughter). But when I dropped out of law school at the age of 23, I was pretty sure that it was the end of my life. I was so raised in the suburban, Pakistani milieu that I believed that if I didn't become a doctor, I didn't become a lawyer, I literally would have no future. And the toll that took on me led me to contemplate for the first time in my life killing myself. And I knew even then that that was abnormal, and I went out to see a family friend, a psychiatrist, spoke to her for a few hours. And she called me back the next day and said I was bipolar. GROSS: Did the diagnosis help you understand emotions or behavior that you had found troubling? MOGHUL: The diagnosis made it harder because I believed that mental illness was a sign of spiritual failure. And so it only confirmed in me this feeling that I had somehow come up short. I thought that what I was going through was either something exclusive to me or a product of my inability to live up to being Muslim. And so when she told me so casually that there was already a - there was a disease out there, for lack of a better term, a mental illness and that a lot of people fell into that category, I didn't know what to do with that. I do know that I pretty much refused it because I thought that that was an excuse, and the real problem was my lack of religiosity. And so instead of accepting that diagnosis and dealing with it, I ran away from it. GROSS: Did a psychiatric diagnosis not fit into your understanding of Islam? Was there no room for a psychiatric interpretation? MOGHUL: I don't know if it's Islam or the culture I grew up in or what it's like to be the child of immigrants, but mental illness was taboo kind of like sexuality. We didn't talk about it. It was a problem for other people in other cultures and other religions. It was not a problem for Muslims. And yeah, I mean I didn't know what to do with it. It's just I mean - she's like, well, you're just bipolar, and that's it. And you can take some medication, and you'll feel better. And I thought that was kind of like cheating or something. GROSS: But you took the medication, right? MOGHUL: I took it for a few weeks. I got some side effects. Somehow my parents found out I was taking the medication. This is a problem when you live in a community made of doctors (laughter), right? Everyone... GROSS: And your doctor was your mother's friend, right? MOGHUL: Yeah. Although I don't think she was the one who spoke to my mom. I think it was another doctor I went to see. And I mean suffice it to say that conversation was so unpleasant that I got off the meds. And I convinced myself that a change in my external circumstances would change my internal condition and that I could beat this on my own. GROSS: Wait; wait. The conversation with your parents was so unpleasant? MOGHUL: Yeah, the conversation about why I was taking these psychiatric medications. I think I was on Lamictal at the time, which is - I think it was a mood stabilizer. I don't even know. And when my mom found out, she called me and asked me why I was taking this medication. And it was a very unpleasant conversation because she implied that I didn't need it and that the diagnosis itself revealed some kind of flaw in me that she was deeply disappointed by. GROSS: So that kind of confirmed your worst fear that it was really your fault for not being a good enough Muslim. MOGHUL: That's exactly how to put it. It was my fault. It wasn't a real problem. Or if it was a real problem, it was ultimately down to something I had done or failed to do. GROSS: So your memoir starts with you on the verge of committing suicide. You're basically walking toward the bridge that you intend to jump from. Was there a last straw for you that got you to that point? MOGHUL: That was a pretty crappy time in my life. I had - and the irony is I had my dream job. I finally got to a place where I wanted to be professionally, financially, creatively, and my life was falling apart. I had been dating and married to a woman for 12 years, which is pretty much my entire adult life. And we had separated, and we were getting divorced. I responded to this incredibly traumatic experience by running and starting another relationship before I was really ready to, and that predictably enough ended in a pretty nasty breakup. My brother was leaving the country, moving to Dubai for work. And it was the combination of these three things - plus my health, which had gotten worse and worse - that pushed me literally to the edge. And so only a few months after moving to Washington, D.C., I was ready to end my life. GROSS: My guest is Haroon Moghul, author of the new memoir "How To Be A Muslim." After we take a short break, we'll talk about why he returned to Islam after considering atheism and Catholicism. And he'll tell us about the sermon that changed his understanding of what it means to be a Muslim. And Ken Tucker will review a new album by Swedish singer-songwriter Jens Lekman. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with Haroon Moghul. His new memoir, "How To Be A Muslim," is about all the doubts he's faced about what it means to be a good Muslim as a first-generation American growing up in a world very different from Pakistan, where his parents emigrated from. As a leader of the NYU Islamic Center, he was often called on to be a spokesperson for the Muslim community, but he often felt like a fraud, like he wasn't a good Muslim himself. Complicating things even more, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. You continued to try to figure out, what is the place of Islam in your life? What kind of Muslim are you? What does it mean for you to be a Muslim? What are some of the things along the way that have helped you on your path to understanding what that might be? MOGHUL: Probably the part of it that's most important is I realized the need to have a spiritual life independent of all these political conversations that we have and independent of the responsibility of being a public, professional Muslim. For me, growing up as a child of Pakistani immigrants, it's hard to explain maybe, but it's almost like your life becomes a checklist of accomplishment. So you go to college. Then you go to graduate school, preferably medical school. Then you finish your residency. Then you become a doctor completely and entirely with your own practice or at a hospital. It doesn't matter. And but you're ready to get married, and you get married. And you buy a house somewhere in the suburbs, and you have kids. And the process is repeated until the end of time, right? It's like a checklist, right? Like, you just move through life as a series of accomplishments. And then I guess at some point, you just die, right? Like, that's just life. And whether or not I realized it, I think it had less to do with Islam and more to do with being the child of immigrant parents. I had internalized this idea of checklist life. And so yeah, I wasn't a doctor, but I was pursuing a career as a public intellectual in which there were the same sort of points that I would have to reach in order to make the right kind of progress. And when I was in my early 30s and I walked to that bridge, it's because none of those things had worked out in the way that I thought they would, that I had gotten married, but I didn't have kids, and I was divorced. And my professional life wasn't necessarily moving along as fast as I thought it would. And so it meant that the story I told myself about why it was alive and what my life was supposed to mean didn't make sense. And it wasn't politics that saved me. It wasn't cultural identity or ethnic identity. It wasn't professional Muslim life that that protected me. It was this connection to God. And it was almost independent of any Muslim community and very deliberately. It was a deeply private, personal connection to God, who was there for me when nothing else was working. GROSS: You describe a trip to Dubai in which you went to a mosque there and were disappointed that the imam who you'd hoped to hear wasn't there that day. But the person who was was for you incredible. And it sounds like it was a turning point in your religious life. Would you describe to the extent that you can your experience in the mosque that day? MOGHUL: The way I was taught Islam when I was growing up was a set of practices that you do so that you don't go to hell. There was almost nothing there of the idea of actually transforming yourself or having a personal and intimate relationship with God. And what I began to find in Dubai, including at that mosque, was this idea of spirituality as a practice and as a struggle to reach a different point in your life. And what I found so moving about this imam's prayers were that he very openly and candidly expressed in beautiful Arabic his insufficiencies. And I had never encountered that kind of vulnerability in religion. He was a celebrity imam, for lack of a better term. And I don't mean that as a putdown. I mean that he was very well-regarded and very well-known. And many Muslims, if they read his name, they'll recognize him. You can find it on YouTube. You can you can find him in lectures and audio recordings and everything you can imagine. GROSS: Do you want to mention his name? MOGHUL: And he was up there. His name was Idrees Abkar. And he was talking about how he'd come up short and how time and again he'd failed as a Muslim. And I had never experienced that kind of frank, open conversation about spiritual shortcomings. I had always treated religious leaders as people who had somehow figured it out and reached a point where they didn't have any doubt; they didn't have any questions; they didn't have any insufficiencies. And that moment, that night in the mosque in Ramadan - I was in a neighborhood of Dubai called Rashidiya - was transformative. GROSS: You know, we were talking about, like, finding a way of being Muslim that speaks to you as an American living in the 21st century. When you were younger, you flirted with atheism, with Catholicism. You looked into other religions as well. As somebody who questions everything, why were you a bad atheist when you tried being an atheist? MOGHUL: Can you be a bad atheist? GROSS: It sounds like you were. MOGHUL: I was a fraudulent atheist. I invented an entirely new category. I really just wanted to have a girlfriend. That's pretty much what it came down to. And I wanted to go to parties, and I wanted to have fun. And Islam was kind of like this straitjacket. So I decided that if I didn't believe in God, that I - then I would be free to do whatever I wanted. So my atheism was a strategic, utilitarian atheism, that I moved into a space where there was no God in order to live the kind of life I wanted to. But it was never out of conviction. And for me personally, I've never been able to believe in the idea of a universe that does not have a creator. And so I - it felt inauthentic. And so it was more of a stopgap phase. And then I got really interested in other religions because I thought maybe the problem isn't Islam. Maybe the problem is Islam, not religion. So I look to Catholicism, Judaism, Mormonism. I looked into different sects of Protestantism. I actually even looked at Zoroastrianism. I was a pretty eclectic spiritual experience. GROSS: But you returned to Islam. MOGHUL: I did. I did principally because I felt like through Islam, I could bring together these religious traditions I was exploring. And so growing up in a very Christian environment, I found the idea of Jesus and the figure of Jesus to be deeply moving. And I ended up in Saudi Arabia, which is never where you want to end up incidentally. But I ended up in Saudi Arabia. GROSS: (Laughter). MOGHUL: It's just - it's not like, oh, yeah, I went there, you know, just because it was, like, a great place to be. I went there on a pilgrimage. My brother invited me. This was back in 1998 when I'd just finished high school. And I remember standing outside the tomb of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina this scorchingly hot day. It was 123 degrees, just feels like the sun is punching you in the face. And I had this moment - I guess you could call it an epiphany - that if I became a Christian, I would have to reject Muhammad. But if I stayed a Muslim, I could keep Jesus because in the Muslim tradition, Jesus is the Messiah, and so he's a very, very significant figure in our religious and spiritual life. And so Islam allowed me - and this was weird at the time. Islam allowed me to stitch together these different parts of my life. But it wasn't like a hooray-I'm-Muslim moment. It was more like, damn, I'm still Muslim. And... GROSS: (Laughter). MOGHUL: So, like, I can't - no matter how hard I try, I cannot get out of this space. But it actually opened the door to what we were talking about earlier, which was helping to build the Islamic Center at NYU because I realized I wanted to be Muslim, and I wanted to figure out a way to do that on my own terms. GROSS: Well, let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is Haroon Moghul. And he is the author of a new memoir called "How To Be A Muslim: An American Story." He's also a fellow in Jewish-Muslim Relations at the Shalom Hartman Institute. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Haroon Moghul. He's the author of the new memoir "How To Be A Muslim: An American Story." He helped build the NYU Islamic Center when he was a student there. And this was about the time of 9/11. So one of your titles now is that you're a fellow in Jewish-Muslim Relations at the Shalom Hartman Institute. This is an institute that had a big impact on your life because you were asked to participate in a group of Muslim leaders going to Israel to learn more about Israel and Jewish life and Zionism. And you took a lot of heat within the Muslim community for participating in this trip. Would you tell us more about the trip and why you decided to go and why it was so controversial? MOGHUL: I was living in Dubai at the time. I received the invitation through a very good friend of mine, and he said, would you like to go to Israel to study Judaism and Zionism? And I said, not particularly (laughter). And he pushed me on it, and he said, it's a really powerful program; it's a really impactful program; you should think about it. And finally I said I think out of curiosity - it was when the Arab Spring was first starting to take a turn for the worse. I said to myself, I actually don't know any Israelis, and I don't really know anything about Israel beyond what I've read in books. I'd visited in 2001 for a few days. But I was 21 years old, and it wasn't like I was deeply immersed in any kind of experience. So I said, yeah, like, let me try it out; let me see what it's like. And I thought it would be, like, a conference you go to. Maybe, you know, you talk to some folks for a couple weeks. You get to learn some stuff, and then you walk away. You move on. And instead, it became this incredibly impactful experience I think because the Hartman Institute is an educational institution that brings together people who take religious identity seriously and who take the modern world seriously. And I felt a kind of intellectual and spiritual kinship that I never imagined I would feel with people from a different religious tradition. And what was perhaps most remarkable of the whole experience is that we had very different political views. I mean they're a Zionist, and I'm not. And I had always and continue to identify as a pro-Palestinian Muslim who sees in the Palestinian story resonances religiously, ethnically, politically, culturally. In many ways, it is a story of a colonized population, and I come from a colonized population. And so to then be in conversation with people who didn't expect you to agree and actually embrace disagreement and difference was really moving enough that I went from being a participant in the program to working for the Hartman Institute. GROSS: So does this program also include taking Jewish people to Gaza? MOGHUL: So that's been one of the harshest criticisms of the program, is that it's a one-sided program. And it is very deliberately a one-sided program in part because as I see it, a Jewish-Israeli institution is not the place where you would want to learn the Palestinian narrative, that you would want to learn from Palestinians themselves. One thing I do for Hartman, however, is I do teach courses on Islam and the Muslim world and share my perspective and Muslim and Palestinian perspectives on the conflict, again, not because I want my audience to necessarily agree with everything I'm saying but simply to develop an appreciation for a narrative they may have never encountered. And I say that as someone who's studied the region academically, who's traveled throughout the region and feels deeply invested in the conflict. Although, I am not - as you pointed out, I'm not Palestinian. I'm not Arab. But I grew up, again, in a Pakistani household where the Palestinian cause was seen as a parallel to and part of the very same cause that my parents embraced, which was this liberation and upliftment of Muslim peoples. GROSS: So your mother was a doctor, and she was - she went to med school in Pakistan... MOGHUL: Yeah. GROSS: ...And was one of the few women of her generation to go to med school. So I'm wondering where your mother stood on the issue of, like, women's rights and women's equality. MOGHUL: My mom's family probably explodes a lot of assumptions people have about Muslims and Islam. So my mother's family actually - and the reason I give you the long history is to give you a sense of the background I grew up in. They moved from Iraq to South Asia near Delhi in India in the 13th century. So they were Arabs at one point, and they arrived in India. And there are Wikipedia entries of my ancestors going back to the 16th century. I come from the Muslim equivalent of a rabbinic family. So pretty much everyone from my grandfather on backwards, as far as we can tell, was a religious scholar. My grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather - again, that's as far back as I know - were fluent in Arabic, in Persian, were avid consumers of literature and inhabited this kind of Muslim humanism that well predates the West. And my grandfather had seven daughters, and he raised all of them to be educated, remarkably strong and independent women. I was spared, fortunately, the common patriarchal stance of religion. Actually, my mother's family is full of strong women. All of them are accomplished. Some of them are authors. Some of them are doctors. But it's a remarkable family to be a part of. And so I - you know, I look at a lot of the kind of parochial Islam that's so prominent in the world as not just alien to my personal experience but not really consistent with Islam as I was raised to understand it. GROSS: Do you ever feel like you're so - it's so important for you to challenge the stereotypes that some Americans have of Islam - the stereotype of like, you know, terrorism - that in order to challenge those stereotypes, does that make it difficult for you to also challenge the parts of Islam that you don't like, you know, the dictators, ISIS? MOGHUL: It is - it's like walking a tightrope. How do you be publicly critical of a community and a religion that you love? And at a time when those identities are under attack, what does it mean to be sincerely critical of your own community? And that's not easy. And I experienced that in my work with the Shalom Hartman Institute where, you know, a number of my critics were unable to understand that I was not endorsing a particular narrative. I was simply embracing the idea of being part of a conversation with people who are different from myself with the hope that something, some deeper appreciation and respect and progress would grow out of those conversations. But it is hard because you feel like you're being hit on both sides. I remember I was - the first time I spoke on a panel in Jerusalem, the first comment I got after the panel was, I didn't know Muslims could be funny, which is kind of amazing, since, like, you think there's, like, 1 and a half billion people who like, never tell jokes (laughter) or, like, find nothing amusing. It's a little - it's weird. And then the second comment was by a gentleman who expressed surprise and said, I thought you were going to be Hamas. My immediate reaction was like, you thought the Shalom Hartman Institute was inviting Hamas to speak to you? GROSS: (Laughter). MOGHUL: It's a little bit weird, right? Like, I don't know if that reflects on me or that reflects on the institute or on you. I'm not really sure who should be more embarrassed at this moment. But that's the kind of reaction I get in a lot of places. And even on the book tour, you still get people who are - who, I mean - literally, I think not too long ago, a person said to me, you're really fun to listen to; you should be a Christian. GROSS: (Laughter). MOGHUL: I was like, so that's... GROSS: What a strange thing to say. MOGHUL: (Laughter) So it's like, well, you know, if you're interesting, why would you be in such a boring religion? And it was like, thanks I think. GROSS: (Laughter). MOGHUL: But he bought the book, so it's OK. Like, I don't - as long as you buy my book, I will take anything. I'll accept it. GROSS: (Laughter) Haroon Moghul, it's been great to talk with you. Thank you so much. MOGHUL: Thank you. GROSS: Haroon Moghul's new memoir is called "How To Be A Muslim." After we take a short break, Ken Tucker will review a new album by Swedish singer-songwriter Jens Lekman. This is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

• The Atlantic - https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/haroon-moghul-how-to-be-a-muslim/528552/

  Trying to Be an Apolitical Muslim in America
  Haroon Moghul’s book How to Be a Muslim tries out a new genre: writing about Islam that’s not about terrorism or war.

  Roses are laid on the 9/11 memorial in New York CityReuters
  EMMA GREEN JUN 3, 2017 POLITICS
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  Haroon Moghul is tired of reading books about American Muslims and terrorism. The 30-something writer and educator often gives talks and teaches courses, where “people come up to me ... and say, ‘What can I read about Islam that will help me understand who Muslims are?’” he told me. “There are so few books out there that I would recommend. It’s deeply disheartening.”

  RELATED STORY

  American Muslims Are Young, Politically Liberal, and Scared

  In How to Be a Muslim, Moghul has tried something new: a memoir about how his “life kind of crashed and burned” around age 32, as he put it. He writes about the pains and hilarities of growing in a South Asian family in bucolic Massachusetts; his lifelong struggle with mental illness and adult diagnosis with bipolar disorder; and his many crushes, including his ex-wife, Hafsa, whom he later divorced. The book is by turns delightful and bizarre; it’s confessional writing about being Muslim, but also about struggles that are likely common across religions.

  It’s not exactly apolitical: Moghul’s mental illness is specifically conditioned by the anxiety and pressure of being a “professional Muslim,” as he puts it. But it’s an attempt to claim literary space for American Muslims that’s not about geopolitics. And Moghul has offered up his own life as material.

  I spoke with Moghul about politics, confessional writing, and how Muslim communities deal with mental illness. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

  Green: You were a college student in New York on 9/11. You describe how that moment defined your life as a Muslim in America.

  And yet, you wanted to write a book that’s not political. How do you write an apolitical book when your identity has been so thoroughly shaped by politics?

  Moghul: I wanted to keep the politics at remove. Terrorism and extremism, the pervasive influence of Islamophobia—they are always there in the background. But I wanted to talk about how that affected me personally. I wanted about the day-to-day existence of a Muslim in America. People’s personal struggles with love, desire, and feelings of guilt; the constant tension every one of us has between what we want to do and what we believe we should do; my own struggles with mental illness, divorce, financial failure, professional failure; losing my job, losing my home: They’re universal struggles that have maybe some Muslim particularities.

  There are plenty of books on Islamophobia or America and the Middle East. But there are not a lot of books that actually talk about what this means in a person’s life.

  Because I was in New York, and I was president of the Muslim club at New York University, I was forced into that response: I became a professional Muslim. A lot of people in my generation became professional Muslims. The most disheartening part is that we recognize, with the election of Donald Trump and the rise of far-right movements across the West, that this is probably going to be with us for our lifetimes.

  Emma Green: You tried to get away from politics this through a vulnerable, first-person narrative, talking about everything from your break-ups to your struggle with mental. What was the appeal of this kind of writing?

  Haroon Moghul: Sometimes, saying things out loud breaks their power over you. We have a tendency in America to frame Islam as completely other. People on the far right want to know who’s Muslim, possibly to keep us out of the country. And then you have people on the left who wonder why anyone would be Muslim because they’re skeptical of religion in general. For most Muslims, the question is not who is a Muslim, or why be a Muslim. It’s how to be a Muslim. I wanted to go somewhere beyond the apology literature, of which there is way too much in the Muslim community.

  “If a community is willing to be critical of itself, it’s actually much stronger.”

  Green: What do you mean by “apology literature”?

  Moghul: To me, a lot of the literature on Islam has its head in the sand. You have this “Islam is a religion of peace” mantra, which is fine if you mean Islam should be a religion of peace. But clearly, there are many Muslims who do not believe that, and believe their violent worldview is justified and encouraged by Islam. You have to deal with that. You can’t simply wish it away.

  Green: You talk a lot about Muslims’ fear of perceived weakness and vulnerability. And you also talk a lot about mental illness.

  Do you think there’s any connection between these two themes—a seemingly renewed focus on mental illness among some American Muslims and this environment of anxiety they’re living in?

  Moghul: I don’t know what it’s like to be—I guess the word is normal? I don’t know what it’s like not to be bipolar. I don’t know what it’s like not to think about killing yourself every so often. I didn’t write this because I wanted to air dirty laundry, or because I was thinking about how this would affect Muslims politically. Writing saves me.

  If this gives someone a little sliver of hope, especially but not only in Muslim communities, then I think it’s worth it. I’m sure there are a lot of kids out there who grow up in communities where they’re not told about mental illness, and maybe they’re told that it’s a spiritual disease, and they’re struggling alone. There’s this common Muslim response when someone is genuinely depressed: They’ll tell them to pray more, or that it’s because God’s angry at them, which is the worst thing you can tell someone. It’s basically telling them that in addition to all the other ways they’ve failed, they’ve also failed spiritually. My hope is that this actually strengthens people and gives them some hope.

  If a community is willing to be critical of itself, it’s actually much stronger and much more likely to survive than a community that is scared of looking at itself with two eyes open.

  Green: Do you think there’s discomfort in American Muslim communities with talking about mental illness?

  Moghul: There is discomfort. But there’s been tremendous change. One of the most positive developments of the past 15 or 20 years is that we’re developing a class of professional imams and chaplains who know what they’re talking about, and understand what it is to minister to people and serve a congregation. There’s been tremendous progress in this space.

  I still come across a lot of people who are struggling alone and afraid of saying anything. But I also meet a lot of religious leaders and community leaders who will talk about mental illness, and who are willing to not only bring it up but put resources behind it. So it’s changing. Maybe not as fast as it should be. But it’s changing.

• The Rumpus - http://therumpus.net/2017/11/the-rumpus-interview-with-haroon-moghul/

  THE STORY WE HAVE YET TO TELL: TALKING WITH HAROON MOGHUL
  BY KELLY THOMPSON

  November 10th, 2017

  With How to Be a Muslim: An American Story, Haroon Moghul has written a spiritual coming of age story uniquely suited to modern America. Thrust into the spotlight after 9/11, becoming an undergraduate leader at New York University’s Islamic Center, Moghul became a prominent voice for American Muslims even as he struggled with his relationship to Islam. In high school, he was barely a believer and convinced he was going to Hell. He sometimes drank. He didn’t pray regularly. All he wanted was a girlfriend.

  How to Be a Muslim is the story of the second-generation immigrant, of what it’s like to lose yourself between cultures, and how to pick up the pieces. Amid depression and bipolar disorder, Moghul struggled to understand his intellectual heritage and the sometimes-debilitating stress of being Muslim in a country where Muslims are often considered suspect. How to Be a Muslim reaches across religions and cultures and into the heart of what it means to be an American.

  Moghul is a Fellow in Jewish-Muslim Relations at Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. He is the author of The Order of Light (Penguin 2005), and has written for the Washington Post, the Guardian, Time, Foreign Policy, Haaretz, and CNN.com.

  We spoke in September.

  ***

  The Rumpus: How to be a Muslim: An American Story is a rich, intersectional, and complex memoir. The story begins with the narrator on a bridge contemplating suicide when his cell phone starts to vibrate miraculously. He’s prevented from carrying the act out. As the story unfolds, we begin to understand how he came to be in that scary position.

  How do you see the combination of medical issues, along with culture clash inherent in being second generation American, Muslim, and of Pakistani heritage, working together?

  Haroon Moghul: 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.

  When the bipolar diagnosis came along, it hit me in very much the same way. It was a little bit like I went back to where I was as a child and felt myself in the exact same position all over again, condemned before I even had a chance to make a case for myself.

  Rumpus: This book is, in part, the universal story of one young man contending with his lineage within the context of late 20th century America. It’s a microcosm of what America itself began grappling with following 9/11. Tell me about that day. You were at New York University when it happened.

  Moghul: I remember when we left our classroom, a group of us met up in Washington Square Park and we were looking up at the sky, facing south. There were columns of smoke where the towers had been visible. I remember asking one of my friends what we do now. He looked at me very seriously and said, “You tell us. You’re in charge of the Islamic Center.” It occurred to me that whether I wanted to or not, due to my position, I had a special obligation to wider American society. Unusually for a Muslim student at the time, I was probably better read in Islamic history and Middle Eastern politics than many of my peers.

  This was a position, in a way, that I felt forced to take on. I’m a different person now than I was sixteen years ago, but it’s still very much the case that we can get boxed into this Muslim identity. It’s not just wider American society that does that. I think a lot of Muslims do that to themselves, and grapple with the questions we ask ourselves.

  That’s where the title comes from, How to Be a Muslim. What does it mean to be a Muslim in the modern world? What are the challenges that confront us? What are the implications of our beliefs? There are very few Muslim answers to those questions that I find compelling or relevant.

  Rumpus: You write: “I might’ve hoped that after 9/11 we would go back to normal, that no one could do anything as senseless and supercilious as invade Iraq on no grounds whatsoever, but that’s what happened. America could plunge herself into a permanent, escalating emergency, trapped by Islam. Just like I was. I’d never wake up from September.” Have you awakened these sixteen years later?

  Moghul: There were three phases in my life after September 11. The first 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 second phase was this sense of burnout and wanting to get away from it all. I think that’s very much what my time in Dubai was about. No matter how much energy or effort I put into it, the rock, so to speak, just got bigger.

  The third phase, the one that I think is the most interesting, is where I realized that the questions we were asking were silly. The question we should be asking is not, “Do you condemn terrorism?” It’s, “What kind of world, what kind of society do you want to live in?” Getting stuck in the ‘let’s respond to the worst people in the world mode’ doesn’t get us anywhere because it never imagines anything.

  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 often ask me, how do we respond to Islamophobia? What I often 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.

  For Muslims, it’s especially unsettling because 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.

  Rumpus: When you were in Cairo, you broke down: “Who was I to have thought I can fix Muslims or repair Islam when I could not even overhaul myself? I wasn’t going to save the Muslim world through my pathetic efforts at NYU. I was the Muslim world, afraid, frozen, I could not move forward.”

  Can you speak about the narrator’s comparison of himself with the Muslim world?

  Moghul: When I say the Muslim world, I meant Muslim communities around the world. I don’t think we punch at our weight. If there are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, then the fact that we are defined by a slim minority tells you how ineffectual we are.

  One of the foundational stories of Islam is Abraham abandons Hagar and their infant son Ishmael in the desert, and our belief in what becomes Mecca as a result. There’s nothing there in that rock desert. Abraham gets on his mount and rides away. Hagar says, “What are you doing, are you crazy? Did God order you to leave us here?” When she realizes that’s the case, she accepts that her husband is leaving her in the middle of nowhere.

  Another foundational story in Islam is Gabriel appears to Mary and tells her that she’s going to have a child. She’s astonished and says, “But I’ve never been with a man, how can I have a child?” Gabriel basically says, “Well, God decided and you don’t really have a say in the matter.” The Quran very visibly describes what it’s like for her to go into labor in a society where single women were not expected to have children. Even the prophet Muhammad, when he received his first revelation, the person he goes to is his wife and his wife believes him before he believes himself.

  These 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.

  One of the reasons I wrote the book is because 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.

  I reflect what it’s like to be a Muslim in the 21st century. Mine is a very personal story. I’m not claiming to speak on behalf of 1.5 billion people. Nevertheless, my experiences do reflect what a lot of Muslims and a lot of American Muslims, and maybe just a lot of people of faith or people of multicultural origin or reality, go through and struggle with.

  I work for the Shalom Hartman Institute and I was teaching a class last summer in Jerusalem. Two group of rabbis and we were studying different passages from the Quran. One of the passages I’ve included in my syllabus was about Mary and Jesus. One of the rabbis looked deeply puzzled and confused and he raised his hand. He said, “What are Mary and Jesus doing in the Quran?” I did not laugh because I was the teacher so I’m not allowed to laugh at students. Many people in America may be taken by surprise that Islam is one more interpretation of the stories that the Bible, the Jewish and the Christian texts, descend from.

  Rumpus: Islam recognizes the People of the Book, the Torah, and the Christian Gospels. From the Islamic perspective, the Quran is a continuation. The problem is that we have three different versions of the same story.

  Moghul: God is like Hollywood. He is making the same movie over and over again, but he changes some of the details. It’s just like there’s fifteen Spiderman movies.

  Rumpus: The stories all just come in the wrappings of a different culture and history, or context, correct?

  Moghul: Maybe that’s why we fight so much because we’re all arguing over the same thing.

  Rumpus: This is a spiritual coming of age story as much as it is an American story and we have so many stories in America, many of them unheard. How do we tell the greater American story, one that is inclusive, that reflects all the diversity that we are?

  Moghul: One of the ways to tell the American story as it is and not as some people believe it should be is by starting in the grocery store. When you go to the grocery store, you have aisle upon aisle of food and then you have the ethnic food section and somehow that’s not actually food. There’s real or normal food and then there is strange brown people food. We still do that. We don’t realize that the dominant narrative is a perspective and then we say things like “this story is only for certain kinds of people, or well, it’s a Pakistani American story.”

  Most of the stories only apply to the main food aisles, and one of the things I wanted to do, and I hope that I’ve done, is tell a story that is addressed in a Muslim language. The body of which, the essence of which, is fundamentally human. I did toy with calling the book How to Be a Human.

  Rumpus: But you had to call it How to Be a Muslim: An American Story because that very specificity is so important to the story. I also see it as more of a spiritual story versus a religious one.

  Moghul: Yeah. You use the words “religious” and “spiritual.” We know we live in an age when we have people of every religious worldview and that’s impacted the worldview. Fundamentally, you draw from all these different ways of being human, rather than divide the world into belief and non-belief, or religion and non-religion. It’s better to say what are the different ways that people try to be human? Some of those ways are odious and some of those ways are remarkable. They are all ways. Trying to do that takes away some of the foreignness from narratives we don’t often hear and that eludes some of the power of the dominant narratives that we may only hear.

  Rumpus: The narrator grows up in a second-generation American Pakistani family who are also Muslim, in a predominantly white American milieu of a New England town. In terms of narratives, there’s an American immigrant story of assimilation. Is that a story that needs to change? Is it changing?

  Moghul: It’s very much about coming to terms with a way of integrating the different parts of you. When I was younger, I inhabited this universe where I saw disjunctions as I’m either, well, somewhat American, but either Pakistani or American. There’s this moment in the story where I’m tempted to become Christian and I’m very interested in Catholicism specifically. Then I end up in Medina in one of Islam’s sacred cities where the Prophet Muhammad is buried. I’m facing his tomb. I realized that if I were to become a Christian, then I have no room in that tradition for Muhammad.

  If I stay Muslim, I can have Jesus in my life. I don’t think I realized what I was doing in that moment. I understood the choice I was making, but what was underlying it in some ways that’s so much more interesting is that, instead of saying either this or that, I can say this and that. Especially right now in American society, we are increasingly confronted by a loud and empowered minority that sees things as you’re either this or that. It’s happening across the West and many other places in the world.

  What I want to do, and I would like to see more of—and I think this speaks to immigrants—is talk about how you bring those different parts of yourself together. I’m Pakistani in many ways. I am obviously American. I care about being a Muslim. I’m also a Star Trek fan and I wish Lord of the Rings was real, and how do I bring those different parts of myself together? That, to me, is where we should be going in this conversation.

  Rumpus: How do we get to a multiplicity of voices where we’re not making everything either/or, black and white, this or that? How to Be a Muslim: An American Story investigates that.

  Moghul: Books are a great vehicle for that because we get to live inside someone’s imagination or someone’s story and really inhabit it. That’s something we’re losing in this moment with social media. I think the deeper issue is that this consumption of the immediate and the sensational destroys our ability to have specific conversations. That is the story that we’ve yet to tell, which is how these technologies might be hurting us and taking away from the richness of our culture.

  Rumpus: Social media reflects the polarization and division, and then adds to it.

  Moghul: Yeah. 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.

  Maybe where we come up with a better narrative for America is where we tell ourselves a story that says, “Hey, there’s good and bad here. There’s complexity here. There are people who’ve been left out. There are people who have been privileged.” We can try to make sense of that because our story doesn’t have to be this simplistic mythic narrative.

  Rumpus: Another significant theme in How to Be a Muslim is the narrator’s struggle from middle and high school years with how to deal with girls. You wrote, “I didn’t even know Muslims would like talking to girls.” How do religious and cultural attitudes at home towards intimacy and sex clash with the larger culture?

  Moghul: It was probably very normal across the human experience in attraction, desire, and love and yet, I was raised to believe those things are abnormal. What happens is you start to think that you’re abnormal.

  Part of that is sometimes we’re raised to believe that there are parts of ourselves that are bad or shameful and, therefore, we are bad or shameful and so we deserve to be treated badly. Sexuality is one of the ways in which that’s done to people, intentionally or not.

  I think that my life would have been different if I had a healthier view of human sexuality and intimacy. I thought of myself as a freak or a pervert because I wanted to talk to girls. It’s like the most normal thing in the planet. Otherwise, there would be no human beings.

  That shapes so much of the story and many of the problems with relationships because the model I had was you get married when someone finds you a spouse, and once you’re married you stay married. You won’t have problems and if you do have problems, it doesn’t matter, you just stay married. That’s remarkably unhealthy and irrelevant to modern American life and yet, that’s the only model I had. That’s the one, at first, I unconsciously reproduced and then for a long time struggled to displace.

  Rumpus: You came from a legacy that “reached all the way back to Islam’s founding generation.” To 656, in fact.

  Moghul: That was when Ali moved the caliphate from Medina to Southern Iraq.

  This is my mom’s family. I don’t really know that much about my father’s family history. I do know that grandfathers on both sides fought in World War II. One in the Asian theatre, one in the European theatre. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims fought for the French and British armies against the Nazis and the Japanese while they themselves were colonial subjects. They were second class; they weren’t even citizens. They were just second class subjects of these dying empires and yet they saved Europe from barbarism. And not a few generations later, their descendants are being accused of being insufficiently enlightened. We have short historical memories.

  The reason that’s important to me is because I came from a family that had a very rich history and sometimes people have this narrative that it was only when the West showed up that people became cultured and sophisticated or that nothing interesting happened in the world outside of Western Europe. This history was something my mom and our family are proud of and we have this thing called a shajarah, which just means a tree as in a family tree. My maternal grandfather would tell me and his other children and grandchildren about this family heritage. Of course, at times, I experienced this as incredibly onerous and overwhelming but it was also really liberating because I saw that I came from a very rich family tradition. We had writers in our family for a very, very long time.

  Rumpus: Your ancestors on your mother’s side were educated multilingual Muslim yogis. Their books and contributions to Islam can be found at Columbia’s Butler Library.

  Moghul: Yeah, my mom was one of seven sisters. My grandfather only had daughters. They were born in the thirties, forties, and they were all educated and incredibly strong and outspoken women.

  I fully acknowledge and see that there is a lot patriarchy and misogyny in Muslim communities and language, but I also saw growing up these incredibly strong women. My mom was a radiation oncologist and I knew, just even in the Muslim community I grew up in, that there were a lot of these remarkable women who accomplished tremendous things coming to another part of the world, rebuilding their lives, and reinventing themselves, no small feat for anyone. They grew up in a very different time and place.

  I can see the ways in which that heritage was not necessarily healthy for me, but I can also see ways in which it gave me a lot of confidence myself.

  Rumpus: You write that, during your junior year of high school, you were frustrated as you sat at the dinner table and heard Muslim elders and family talk. At that time, hundreds of thousands of European Muslims being slaughtered, raped, exiled, the genocide of Srebrenica, the siege of Sarajevo, Kosovo, simply for being Muslim. You write, “But I wanted to scream I am alone right here sitting in front of you as a young, almost-man who feels things that can only remain latent for so long. People die abroad because they are Muslim, but a person is dying inside because he is Muslim.”

  Moghul: It was this confusing moment. 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 had no space in which to express that. I certainly couldn’t say it in the mosque. I couldn’t say it around my parents or their colleagues because questioning religion was not really something anyone did. Even now, one of the common critiques I get of the book is that I shouldn’t have talked about certain things because it’s religiously problematic, shall we say, to share the fullness of your human experience. It’s better to suppress or deny what people’s actual lives are like. It took me a long time to get to a point where I was willing to come out and talk about it publicly.

  Rumpus: The beautiful thing about the book is that resolution and profound spiritual experience in Abu Dhabi. You came to terms with some of that conflict, and you are today a practicing Muslim.

  Moghul: I learned in the process of this that religion is very important to me, but the way in which I was going to get it was very different. When I was younger, I was not actually religious in my personal life. I had almost nothing about me that was traditionally Muslim and yet, I had this very judgmental view of Islam and especially other Muslims because I had internalized other people’s religious language, which meant I hated myself and I hated a lot of other people.

  I was in New York, in an “Introduction to Islam” class, a secular university class that was experiential. We did a mosque visit. Let’s go see how Muslims worship and meet a community. The imam, the head of the congregation, was speaking. I remember condemning him as the wrong kind of Muslim or insufficiently Muslim and thinking the whole thing was so ridiculous. Fast forward almost twenty years and I go to that exact mosque.

  That’s the first place where I met people who showed me how to be a Muslim in a way that made sense for me.

  Rumpus: I got that one of the ways Islam did that for you, and it’s very profound, was the message about how important it is to love yourself.

  Moghul: I realized a lot of the language that I had considered to be authentically Muslim was just a pathological self-hate.

  When we go through a crisis we beat ourselves up and we say and think that we deserve it and suddenly we lose all sense of moral agency. That’s what I was doing religiously rather than something that made me more connected to God and less concerned with rules and expectations that were imposed on me. It was like put yourself in a box. That’s where my religious heritage helped because, when I looked back and studied the lives of people from the culture I came from, I realized that was not how many Muslims were—not just in the present but in the past.

  Rumpus: What you would say to young people in America who struggle with similar issues? How might they best navigate the tension between community and culture?

  Moghul: I’d say two things. One is, if we go back to the stories I mentioned earlier about Mary and Hagar and the Prophet Muhammad’s wife, what’s remarkable about these stories is that, in many ways, they describe outliers. Mary is a single mom, Hagar is a single mom, and there’s still a lot of stigma associated with single motherhood in modern America—never mind what it was like in tribal societies thousands of years ago. Yet, those are the people through whom God chose to not just act but to set in motion some of the most fundamental religious journeys in the human story.

  Even the Prophet Muhammad’s wife was unusual because she was much older than him and she proposed marriage to him and not the other way around, which is unusual even in our time. There was a lot of subversion of assumed roles and, at times, it can be really, really frustrating to feel like an outsider. But there are blessings in that. One is that you can see the world in ways that you never could if you allowed yourself to get lost in a dominant narrative and you could only see the world in one way. That’s why people in power don’t stay in power, because when you don’t have to understand or experience other points of view, over time you lose your edge, your sophistication, and your creativity.

  In a lot of ways, what this book is really about is how my life fell apart, how I had conflated religion with suburban respectability, and how I had been raised with these twin tracks—I have to be religious in this way and I have to be successful in this way.

  I’d say be very careful about investing too much into what other people think you should be. Not just because it limits you, but because things don’t always work out even if you do the right thing. They don’t have to work out and when they don’t, how are you going to pick yourself back up again? You can’t let other people define what counts and what doesn’t count.

  Rumpus: You have value outside of what is being defined for you. From whatever direction, right?

  Moghul: Absolutely.

  I still have my dark moments. Just to be fully honest, I mean, it’s been nineteen days since I’ve had a suicidal impulse. I’m keeping track because it’s been a good run, and when I’m in that moment, 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 perhaps there are multiple dimensions and multiple universes and the scale absolutely boggles the mind. 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.

  ***

  Author photograph © Rick Bern.

  Kelly Thompson's work has been published or anthologized in The Rattling Wall, Entropy, Oh Comely, Dove Tales, The Rumpus, Proximity, The Writing Disorder, Witchcraft, Manifest Station, 49 Writers, and other literary journals. Her essay "Hand Me Down Stories" was recently nominated for a Pushcart by Proximity. She is also a contributor for The Rumpus and curator for "Voices on Addiction" at The Rumpus. Kelly lives in Denver, Colorado and is a member of Lighthouse Writers Workshop. More from this author →

• Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/How-Be-Muslim-American-Story/dp/0807020745

  About the Author
  Haroon Moghul builds Muslim-Jewish engagement at the Shalom Hartman Institute. He’s written for the Washington Post, the Guardian, Time, Foreign Policy, Haaretz, and CNN. He and his wife want to move back to New York.

• Leicester Review of Books - https://leicesterreviewofbooks.wordpress.com/2006/12/21/an-interview-with-essayist-poet-and-novelist-haroon-moghul/

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  [INTERVIEW] HAROON MOGHUL, AUTHOR OF ‘THE ORDER OF LIGHT’
  Posted by amusiyiwa on December 21, 2006 · Leave a Comment

  1 Votes

  Haroon Moghul graduated from New York University with a degree in Middle Eastern Studies and Philosophy and is currently pursuing a Ph.D at Columbia University.

  He sits on the editorial board of Islamica Magazine and is a regular contributor to Eteraz.org.

  In 2004, his blog, Avari-Nameh won the Brass Crescent Awards for Best Writing, Best Post and Best Overall Blog. The blog is concerned with issues of Muslim identity, politics and society. Moghul went on to receive the Brass Crescent Award for Best Thinker in 2005, for his contribution to the discourse on Islam.

  In addition to writing essays, short stories and poems, Haroon Moghul is the author of two novels: My First Police State (2003), a self-published travelogue; and The Order of Light (Penguin India, 2005).

  In a recent interview, he spoke about his writing and his concerns as a writer.

  What is your latest novel, The Order of Light about? What sets it apart from the other things you have written?

  The book is about what happens when you take a look at the Muslim world, and what happens when extremism follows itself to its most extreme conclusions.

  What happens when a young, impressionable, spoiled, naive Muslim kid goes to Egypt, to learn about Islam, with all the money and resources his privileged Western upbringing provides him, but finds that religion, as he understands it, doesn’t fill the gap he feels? Who should he blame, himself or society? And what happens if he finds a group of people whose answer to that question includes violence? What happens when his own logic leads him to very dark places of the human heart, and human history, and contemporary affairs?

  Most of the time, I write short essays, political commentary, satire or history. “The Order of Light” blends a lot of those genres into itself, but ultimately, “The Order of Light” is a work of fiction, a snapshot of a very troubled young man at a very impressionable age, and that makes it different. I haven’t tried that before. I don’t know if I’ll do it again, but I do know that it was worth it.

  How long did it take you to write the novel?

  Several years, on and off. I started in the summer of 2001, while actually in Cairo, and continued to write it for some time afterwards.

  I get obsessed with revising and rethinking and actually found it hard to say, “You know what? I’m done. No more.”

  It was published in the fall of 2005, by Penguin India. On August 30, 2006, Penguin Global released the work for North American and European markets. In the spring of 2007, Cherche Midi will publish a French translation.

  Which aspects of the work that you put into the book did you find most difficult?

  Trying to create a story that blends a very intense look inside a person’s mind with a rather off-beat, curious science fiction that relies on legends in late classical Muslim history, combining the inner and the outer in a way that satisfies my expectations of the work, and makes itself provocative to Muslims and non-Muslims, Americans and Europeans and Indians and Pakistanis and so on.

  Everyone these days, it seems, can’t go five steps without bumping into Islam. But it’s one thing to confront Islam. Another to try to understand it, or, in my case, make others understand Islam.

  Which did you enjoy most?

  Describing Cairo, and remaking it for an imaginary time-line. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a lovely city, magical even…. and writing it was like reliving it.

  Not to mention the deep history of the place. Being from America, we are often missing out on that kind of antiquity. It’s a special thing, and deserves to be celebrated and recalled.

  What will your next book be about?

  If only I could find the time to write!

  Let’s just say I’m working on it, and it’s nothing like my previous book. It deals with a lot of deep ideas… Love. Belonging. Community. Loneliness. Madness. Ambition. Inheritance. Two choices when both are bad. But it’s not about Islam, or the Islamic world, or even the modern world.

  I want to write something for an English audience that wants a damn good story, something they’ll put down and think, I was entertained, fascinated and troubled and intrigued and I feel like there was more than a little bit of me in it.

  What would you say are your main concerns as a writer?

  We are made of many perspectives. Morally, it is up to us to bring them into harmony — in Indian Islam, that’s called tatbiq — but moral harmony doesn’t mean denying diversity. On the contrary. That becomes very limiting, very stifling, very stale. I want to get beyond that.

  It is very important that what we write have a positive effect, on ourselves and on others. That means that, as a Muslim, as a student, as an American, I want to have a clarifying impact on myself and on others, to preserve knowledge, to improve, to assist, and a writer should be careful not to write for the sake of baser impulses, because that can cause personal and social harm.

  I don’t believe in a simplistic art for art’s sake — I am an adult, and that requires maturity, sensitivity, and a respect for one’s dignity and humanity. But don’t think this means dry summarization and transmission. Oftentimes imaginary scenarios and fantasy allow us to see ourselves, and our capabilities, our weaknesses, our potentials and our hopes, from very fascinating perspectives.

  In the writing that you are doing, who has influenced you the most?

  I remember, years ago, when I was still in grade school, loving stories, loving reading and enjoying writing. For a while I was enthralled by poetry, but as I entered college, I began to realize how much more I enjoyed prose. So as my interest in poetry waned, my interest in prose accelerated. Even now, I don’t feel right if I don’t write, preferably every day, if even something small, something trite.

  It’s almost a compulsion. But it is a very wonderful compulsion.

  I read a lot. As a student, planning to go into academia, and as someone who enjoys wide varieties of writing, I can’t really narrow this list down very successfully. Some fiction names would include Pamuk, Kafka, Philip Roth, Arthur Philips, Updike, Orwell, Huxley, Milan Kundera.

  I love non-fiction, especially essays, whether journalistic — I’m thinking what goes into The New Yorker, or work by people like Geneive Abdo, Amy Waldman, Anthony Shadid — and collections of essays, too. Not to mention that television and film have been profound influences. I think the visual medium has succeeded in telling great stories, and I don’t see why writing can’t be seen as influenced by, and influencing, good visual media. In that regard I enjoy everything from Iranian films to science fiction.

  Speaking of Iran, the classical Muslim tradition has been a powerful force too, from the lessons of the Qur’an to Urdu, Persian and Arabic poetry and philosophy and aesthetics. There are some astonishingly beautiful works of art in that cultural universe, which are sadly passed over by people more interested in Islam as little more than sacred terror.

  Have your own personal experiences influenced your writing?

  I don’t see how one can be influenced by anything but a personal influence. What other kind of influence is there, really?

  How much time do you spend on writing?

  Sometimes I read about novelists so dedicated to their task, their craft, they set aside time to write everyday, and do so religiously. I could only aspire to be so dedicated. I used to write more than I do now, not only for myself, but blogging; these days, however, I have decided to concentrate more on my studies. I very much want to be a professor, and feel that, armed with a Ph.D., I could expand the range, scope and effectiveness of my writing. Till then, though, I should be doing more reading and more research. More to learn. Much, much more.

  What would you say are the biggest challenges that you face?

  Of course, like so many other young Americans, I worry about finding a job, a good standard of living, politics, the environment, paying for health care, so on and so forth.

  Like any person raised in a religious tradition, I worry a lot about salvation. Am I doing the right thing with my life? If I die tomorrow, what will become of me? Because, in a worldly sense, I have so much to be thankful for. I am at a great school, studying what I love. I have wonderful friends and family, and, being recently married, can confidently say I have decided to spend the rest of my life with an astonishingly perfect woman.

  How do you deal with these challenges?

  Prayer. And lots of worrying, too. It’s important to relax, and I do that through writing, of course, [and through] reading, socializing, watching movies, taking walks [and] listening to music.

  What would you say has been your most significant achievement as a writer? And, how did you get there?

  Getting published.

  By the grace of God, with hard work, and most of all, the support of family, friends and great advisors, editors and total strangers. The library in my old hometown, Somers, Connecticut — that staff was so helpful, so kind, so encouraging, so resourceful!

  Writing might seem like a lonely task. But it takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, and depends upon the kindness, concern and assistance of a lot of other people. I am so grateful that I had this chance and I hope I never lose that sense of gratitude.

  This article has been featured on Conversations with Writers and Blogcritics.org.

  Advertisements

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Moghul, Haroon: HOW TO BE A MUSLIM
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Moghul, Haroon HOW TO BE A MUSLIM Beacon (Adult Nonfiction) $17.00 6, 6 ISBN: 978-0-8070-
2074-6
The troubled tale of one man's search for faith and happiness.A self-described "professional Muslim,"
Moghul shares his life story, as a Muslim navigating his faith and a man struggling with mental illness, in
painstaking detail. Plagued by health issues during his childhood, the author went on to an adolescence
filled with intense angst. Both defined and confined by his religion, Moghul eventually found himself an
atheist, of sorts. "I chose not to believe in God," he explains, "because, with Him out of the way, there was
at last room for me." Circumstances changed, in a way, once he moved away from home and began his
studies at New York University. Islam then became a common bond for community and a cause for which
the author could work. He helped create a student Islamic center and was heading it up when the 9/11
attacks occurred, thrusting him into the world of media as a voice for Islam. Nevertheless, he was still
detached from Islam as a personal faith and suffering from mental illness. A diagnosis of bipolar disorder,
near-suicide attempts, a failed marriage, a failed run at law school, and a troubled career as a spokesman for
Islam make up the remainder of the book. Moghul's work is certainly an intriguing case study in
psychology. As for his tie to Islam, that is in fact just one piece of the puzzle, and the author's self-loathing
permeates his life story, which becomes almost a caricature of faith-related guilt. "I felt existentially
nauseated," he writes near the end. Despite some almost inevitable insights into life as an American
Muslim, this memoir is, above all, a work of catharsis. Readers play the part of therapist, listening to
Moghul's tortured story, which never finds a true resolution. Studded with some useful observation but fails
to properly address the title.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Moghul, Haroon: HOW TO BE A MUSLIM." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A487668461/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8002117b.
Accessed 16 Dec. 2017.
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How to Be a Muslim: An American Story
Publishers Weekly.
264.15 (Apr. 10, 2017): p69.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* How to Be a Muslim: An American Story
Haroon Moghul. Beacon, $17 trade paper
(256p) ISBN 978-0-8070-2074-6
In sometimes heartbreaking and staggering prose laced with subtle and sardonic humor, Moghul (The Order
of Light) shares what it looks like to hammer out an American Muslim identity. Amid depression and
bipolarity, between being Pakistani and American, Moghul discovers that Islam is not a straitjacket but a
free-flowing wardrobe of expression and being in which he lives as he moves through the modern world.
The narrative, rife with pop-culture references and Qur'anic reflections, follows the author through
adolescence and adulthood as he struggles to understand his intellectual heritage and the sometimes
debilitating stress of being Muslim in a country where Muslims are always considered suspect. As Moghul
loses himself and seeks himself, readers will appreciate his story as a second-generation Muslim immigrant,
but also as a representative of the modern man: searching, groping, discovering, losing, loving, hoping,
dreaming, and suffering. Highly recommended for its candor and relatability, this book will invite readers to
fathom what it means to grasp Islam--and religion and spirituality in general. June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"How to Be a Muslim: An American Story." Publishers Weekly, 10 Apr. 2017, p. 69. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490319321/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=b2f43c43.
Accessed 16 Dec. 2017.
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Thinking anew about God
Tikkun.
29.3 (Summer 2014): pCOV+.
COPYRIGHT 2014 Duke University Press
http://tikkun.dukejournals.org/
Full Text:
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The Torah warned us that if we didn't create a society based on justice, love, generosity, and caring for the
earth, there would be an environmental crisis. Here it is. Recognizing this connection does not require us to
believe that there is a big man in heaven making judgments and sending down punishments. Rather, the
Torah is communicating a way of viewing the planet: that it is not a collection of dumb matter acting
accidentally but rather a physical/ethical/spiritual integrated whole, and that when the ethical and spiritual
dimension is out of whack, the physical is in danger of collapse.
W e see this playing out in our own time. The ethos of materialism and selfishness, played out on a global
scale through the globalization of capital, has led us to treat the earth as a bottomless cookie jar from which
endless goodies can be extracted and as a bottomless wastebin into which endless garbage can be dumped.
But the earth doesn't function this way. And the drought in the American West and other weather changes
are only the tip of the melting iceberg! Weather and food production will be increasingly unpredictable in
the next decades as the human footprint continues to grow toward the sixth great extinction of species
(including perhaps the human species). That's why the Environmental and Social Responsibility
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (tikkun.org/ESRA), while "unrealistic" in terms of the current received
wisdom about what is possible in U.S. politics, is nevertheless the only realistic path to take if we want to
save the planet from further environmental disasters.
ESSAYS BY
Walter Brueggemann, John B. Cobb Jr., Gary Dorrien, Michael Lerner, David R. Loy, Sallie McFague,
Haroon Moghul, Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Mark I. Wallace, and
Sadhana: Coalition of Progressive Hindus
Brueggemann, Walter^Cobb, John B., Jr.^Dorrien, Gary^ Lerner, Michael^Loy, David R.^McFague, Sallie^
Moghul, Haroon^Plaskow, Judith^Christ, Carol P.^ Ruether, Rosemary Radford^Wallace, Mark I.^Sadhana
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Thinking anew about God." Tikkun, Summer 2014, p. COV+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A376510824/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=44d2c76d.
Accessed 16 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A376510824
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The truth about Muslims in America
Dale Sprusansky
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
31.2 (March-April 2012): p54.
COPYRIGHT 2012 American Educational Trust
http://www.washington-report.org
Full Text:
Concerned by the abundance of misinformation regarding islam in American society, the Religious
Education Freedom Project at the Newseum in Washington, DC hosted a Jan. 18 public forum titied "What
is the Truth about Islam and Muslims in America?" Attendees were invited to ask challenging questions
about the Muslim faith to a panel of experts on Islam and interfaith peace. By discussing and providing
accurate and clear answers to issues such as women's rights, shariah law, and jihad, event organizers hoped
that listeners developed a greater understanding of the peaceful nature of Islam. Charles C. Haynes, director
of the Religious Freedom Education Project, moderated the discussion.
Before panelists began answering audience questions, a brief video titled "My Fellow American" was
screened. The video, produced by Unity Productions, showed everyday American Muslims--doctors,
firefighters and mothers--against an audio background of incendiary anti-Muslim rhetoric. Among the
chilling remarks was radio talk show host Michael Savage calling the Qur'an "a book of hate" and stating
that Muslims "need deportation." Following the video, Alex Kronemer, co-founder of the Unity Productions
Foundation, explained that the brief film was intended to showcase the ""careless and opportunistic
rhetoric" that has targeted Muslims following 9/11.
Throughout the question-and-answer session, panelists emphasized that people of all faiths must fight for
the protection of religious rights and advocate for interfaith understanding. Melissa Rogers, director of the
Center for Religion and Public Affairs at Wake Forest University, called on Christians to not "let false
witness against other faiths slide." People of different faiths "have to go to bat for one another's rights," the
Baptist opined.
Rabbi Marc Schneier, president of Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, agreed, stating that people of all
faiths "have a single destiny." Defending the Qur'an as a book that promotes peace, Rabbi Schneier noted
that because many people fail to read Islamic oral tradition, definitions and terms used in the Qur'an are
often misunderstood and incorrectly interpreted.
Haroon Moghul, a fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, noted that because the Qur'an
emerged from a harsh desert society, oral tradition plays a crucial role in making verses written for 7th
century Arabian society relevant and meaningful to Muslims today.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
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To watch a video of the Newseum event visit (www.myfellowamerican.us/new-seum). The film "My Fellow
American" can be viewed at (www.myfellowameri-can.us).
Sprusansky, Dale
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Sprusansky, Dale. "The truth about Muslims in America." Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Mar.-
Apr. 2012, p. 54. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A284939041/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=786ecb45. Accessed 16 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A284939041

"Moghul, Haroon: HOW TO BE A MUSLIM." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A487668461/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 16 Dec. 2017. "How to Be a Muslim: An American Story." Publishers Weekly, 10 Apr. 2017, p. 69. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490319321/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 16 Dec. 2017. "Thinking anew about God." Tikkun, Summer 2014, p. COV+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A376510824/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 16 Dec. 2017. Sprusansky, Dale. "The truth about Muslims in America." Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Mar.- Apr. 2012, p. 54. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A284939041/ITOF? u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 16 Dec. 2017.

• Foreword Reviews
  https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/how-to-be-a-muslim/
  Word count: 495

  HOW TO BE A MUSLIM
  AN AMERICAN STORY
  Haroon Moghul
  Beacon Press (Jun 6, 2017)
  Softcover $17.00 (256pp)
  978-0-8070-2074-6

  An appealing voice parses through history to demonstrate how the author eventually returned to Islam.

  How to Be a Muslim: An American Story details Haroon Moghul’s journey from nonbelief to faith. With capacious wit and impassioned logic, this timely memoir portrays the forging of a young man’s identity.

  An essayist, broadcaster, and commentator on Islamic affairs, Moghul takes a personal turn describing early rifts between his inward and outward life. He was born to Punjabi parents from Pakistan, and raised as a Muslim in New England despite his lack of connection to God. Thematic chapters detail his struggle to reconcile his family’s religion with his longing for a normal teenage life; attempts at relationships; his college years; excursions to Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, Cairo, and Dubai; bipolar disorder; divorce; and other topics. No matter the event under discussion, it’s the fascinating tension between what others perceive Moghul to be and what Moghul feels that results in a work of biting self-awareness.

  Passages dart between reflection and observation, pop culture and the Qur’an with ease. An appealing voice parses through history to demonstrate how the author eventually returned to Islam. Passages on Muhammad provide an especially informative backdrop. More intriguing chapters cover the topic of activism despite ambivalence. Several sections span Moghul’s time as a leader at NYU’s Islamic Center, where the divide between public conviction and private doubt is drawn with frankness in the months following 9/11. Though the book deals with specific issues—including navigating a changed world in which being Muslim inspires the fear of extremism––Moghul’s story makes a wider impact.

  Chapters that focus on a suicide attempt capture the exhausting, spiraling nature of a man who revisits scenes to understand what went wrong. The writing of the book itself becomes a reason to keep living. It’s here, in the act of ordering words to order the mind, that a redemptive arc emerges. No longer bound by formality, and able to pour out anguish in personal talks with God, the author finds peace.

  For all its open admission of personal faults, the memoir seldom dwells in regret. The challenge of figuring out who and what to become serve as potent reminders that every person, regardless of his or her background, faces similar questions.

  Reviewed by Karen Rigby
  Religion 2017

  Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The author of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the author for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.

• Washington Post
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-it-means-to-be-a-muslim-in-the-west/2017/06/02/9627caee-4555-11e7-98cd-af64b4fe2dfc_story.html?utm_term=.cb4de8dc9d6e
  Word count: 1019

  Opinions
  What it means to be a Muslim in the West
  By Ausma Zehanat Khan June 2
  Ausma Zehanat Khan, former editor of Muslim Girl magazine, is a lawyer and author of the novels “The Unquiet Dead” and “Among the Ruins.”

  Rarely does a book come along that captures the complicated nature of Muslim life in the West with such probing clarity and authenticity. Haroon Moghul’s “How to Be a Muslim: An American Story” is perfectly titled: part memoir, part history lesson, part philosophy. It is a profound and intimate book — the story of a single American Muslim that also illustrates the fears and strengths of a community.

  This is not an easy or comfortable book, nor should it be. It is framed by Moghul’s discussion of an aborted suicide attempt and the lessons he draws from that terrible moment. Though he moves on to discuss his successes and failures, a deep vein of melancholy pervades Moghul’s story. He recounts his earliest understanding of faith in terms that are punitive and alienating, as he yearns to belong, to believe and to be loved. His early life is defined by continuous illness, a condition that adds to his marginalization as the child of immigrants who cannot help him find his footing in a place where faith, culture and race define him as an outsider.

  [What happened to the Syrian boy in the Pope Francis’s children’s book?]

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  Haroon Moghul explores what it means to be Muslim in the West. (Rick Bern)
  But Moghul’s book is not a paean to despair. Through his personal story, he weaves an admirably precise and powerful history of Islam. He juxtaposes this with reminders of the religion’s significance today. As an insider looking within, his story is a thoughtful meditation on how we construe faith as a means of anchoring not only our philosophy but our actions.

  Moghul makes a pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, where he finds the sacred and the profane in equal measure. At the prophet’s mosque, he experiences a moment of reverence as he tries to pray at Muhammad’s tomb. But conservative religious authorities, who wish to keep pilgrims away from the holy site, intervene, pushing the crowds along and denying Moghul and the others the deeper grace they sought. For a Muslim who is connected to the supra-national Muslim community, or the ummah, Moghul’s search for meaning in places as disparate as Sarajevo, Jerusalem, Cairo and the Grand Mosque of Cordoba is instinctively familiar; indeed, the search for roots as a way of belonging is common to us all.

  Moghul, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Policy, also eloquently discusses differing interpretations of religious ideology, lessons learned by diving deep into Islam’s vibrant tradition of theological debate and discourse. One chapter features a brilliant exposition on the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, known to South Asians by his title Allama Iqbal (“the Vastly Learned”). Moghul displays a keen comprehension of the colossal stature of Iqbal in Muslim homes and Muslim understanding. Iqbal’s landmark poetical works — “Shikwa” (“Complaint,” as in humanity’s complaint to God) and “Jawab-e-Shikwa” (“Answer,” or God’s response to humanity) — and “The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam,” a seminal philosophical treatise, are routinely overlooked. Citing Iqbal, Moghul argues that Islam is a dynamic force, not a spent one: “It was meant to be [a] purposeful movement in a world fated to change.”

  Moghul captures the beauty of a tradition so often overwritten and undermined by propagandists on both sides: violent extremists on the one hand, and on the other, Islamophobes who seek to divorce Islam from its place in history, thus rendering its adherents an infinitely assailable other — soldiers of a never-ending crusade that believing Muslims must wage publicly and bravely as an externally imposed burden.

  [A look at Syria: The everyday beauty and the everyday fears]

  As Moghul pointedly notes: “Outside Muhammad’s massive ummah the Prophet is often mocked, rarely acknowledged, and above all ignored. In the West we say ‘Judeo-Christian,’ excising Islam from the tradition of which it is undeniably a part.”

  Such deliberately conceived misunderstanding, coupled with Moghul’s debilitating self-doubt, could drive the most robust spirit into retreat. As Moghul attempts to establish a communal Muslim presence on a university campus in the time between the fall of the twin towers and the invasion of Iraq, he is met with the realization that soon all of Islam — and its adherents — will be conflated with al-Qaeda. Like many Muslims in the public eye, he will find himself in a permanent defensive posture, as his tradition is read back to him as a perversion of his ideals. At the same time, he doubts his convictions, his rightness to serve as a campus or community leader when beset by these inner demons. These dual concerns wear away at his outer facade while redefining his inner truths, a process of continual self-examination and frequently of self-loathing, until he finally arrives at a pinnacle of grace.

  With this memoir, Moghul has given us an extraordinary gift: an authentic portrayal of a vastly misunderstood American community. In place of the “reformers” who are trotted out to point to the failings of the civilization of Islam, he offers reasoned criticism alongside a humanistic reading of Islam as a universal message, as the foundation of successive empires, and as an individual template for grace and positive change.

  In the face of virulent anti-Islam discourse, Moghul treats Islam as a source of personal redemption and as a force for good in the world. Deeply knowledgeable, “How to Be a Muslim” is a revelatory book with valuable lessons for these troubled times.

  HOW TO BE A MUSLIM
  An American Story
  By Haroon Moghul

  Beaon. 231 pp. Paperback, $17

• Deltona Howl
  http://www.deltonahowl.com/how-to-be-a-muslim.html
  Word count: 581

  BOOK REVIEW: HOW TO BE A MUSLIM
  ​BY HAROON MOGHUL

  ​REVIEWED BY KATHERINE CINTRON
  Katherine Cintron is a Deltona High School junior working in volunteer opportunities in communities ranging from art museums and CFCArts to school operations such as SETA, ECO, Howl, and Key Club. Reaching out to competitions and exhibits, she involves herself in ways to better her artistic and educational future to become a professional artist teaching college level students. When not overwhelming herself with school classes, she enjoys reading or watching anything in the genre of sci-fi and studying the branches of science. Drawing every day, writing short stories, and reminiscing her old violin occupies her calming days.

  Published 08/13/17

  Picture
  Click the above image to learn more or buy the book!
  Haroon Moghul was just like any other Muslim trying to fit in the puzzle of the demanding American society – except his past wasn’t quite ideal. As a youth, Haroon recalled his early childhood memories of illness and adolescence filled with angst. He constantly found himself at obstacles in his path through life. Believing that God always had a small plan of vengeance against him from birth, cursing him with persistent surgeries and hospital visits, Haroon began to question his Islamic religion. Why would God punish him with such strict rules to follow by even stricter parents? Certainly, in return, this led to social anxiety, awkwardness, and being labeled as an outcast until his last years of high school when he discovered Green Day’s “Geek Stink Breath”. Plagued by his traditional religious family, Haroon faced the pressures of living up to his ancestors’ rich history and decided to be an atheist. He didn’t care. He didn’t mind the overbearing thoughts of disappointing everyone he knew. He just wanted to occasionally drink and have a girlfriend. And so he did.

  Of course, all upsides have a downside, and eventually he pushed away the responsibilities he knew were peering over his shoulders like sinful vultures. His life began tumbling back down into a bipolar pit of despair. Coping with the Islamophobic pressure of being a second-generation Muslim in America (who could barely call himself that), he studied in multiple professions including psychology and law. Yet he never found a satisfying gratification from any of his efforts. That was when he finally felt something right click in his dejected life. He became the leader of New York University’s Islamic Center and recited the Qur’an to, at first, only a few fellow Muslims, but later to a community of thousands. From that point on, Haroon would touch corners around the globe, speaking on behalf of Muslim-Americans and his revived religion.
  ​
  On his journey and tours, he encountered marriage, divorce, affairs, and heartbreak. Suicide slowly manifested his dwindling body and mind, as his mental and physical health plummeted at alarming rates. Haroon was a puzzle piece whose edges were too rigid to fit into America’s rounded society.

  Never fulfilling a preaching Muslim's shoes, psychologists and therapists did their best to shape his faith and low-self esteem into a man who needed to learn not only to love his daily prayers, but, more importantly, himself. How to Be a Muslim is a book that teaches an American story through pop culture references, Qur’an verses, and a handful of diagnoses from a learning Muslim just striving to be accepted.

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