'Lost' makes a lot of sense to me, philosophically.

Islam is antiauthoritarian, sex-positive monotheism.

Conscience. Conscience is the ultimate measure of a man.

Most people know Muslims in their community but don't realize it.

I think every Muslim woman has to feel the world out for herself.

I've wanted to write comics ever since I figured out it was a job.

Muslims are ordinary members of the working public, just like you.

I don't think there's something inherently irreligious about comics.

There are very religious people who write comics and who love comics.

So many people are of mixed heritage; everyone is from somewhere else.

It's patently impossible for a Muslim character to represent 'all Muslims.'

The story of a passionate woman in a stale marriage is as old as Helen of Troy.

The 'Islam vs. the West' dialogue ceased to be about real people a long time ago.

Love the life you have been given. And be humbled by it. It is not to be despised.

For me, insomnia was something ordinary, and it came and went for ordinary reasons.

I keep setting the bar higher for myself in terms of what I'm trying to accomplish.

Superheroes don't often get their powers in one fell swoop. It's like superhero puberty.

Dear child, some stories have no morals. Sometimes darkness and madness are simply that.

I was born in New Jersey and lived there until I was about 10, so Jersey is in my roots.

Controversy is what mediocre people start because they can't communicate anything meaningful.

I do hope the success of 'Ms. Marvel' will open doors for other characters and other creators.

The road to democracy is rarely smooth, but for Egyptian women, it has been exceptionally bumpy.

Once you discover that the world rewards reckless faith, no lesser world is worth contemplating.

I didn't believe in spiritual homelands, and found God as readily in a strip mall as in a mosque.

Ninety percent of the comic books I've written in the past had little or nothing to do with Islam.

Many of us prefer to live in places abandoned by humans. Less work for us. Detroit is very popular.

When I am in Egypt, I am along for the ride - I am a privileged outsider, but an outsider nonetheless.

Some languages expand not only your ability to speak to different people but what you're able to think.

'Butterfly Mosque' came out of the emails I wrote to family and friends back home after moving to Egypt.

Comic book readers tend to be pretty secular and anti-authoritarian; nothing is above satire in their eyes.

When you write for a comic series, many superheroes have 60 or some years of history that you are coming into.

My faith did not require beauty or belonging - the deeper I went into my practice, the less it required at all.

To me, writing an ongoing series feels like driving a freight train downhill. All you can do is steer and pray.

Being a Muslim in America, I've noticed that there's a ton of crossover between the Muslim community and geekdom.

The Qur'an is in many ways far less concrete than the Bible, relying on the esoteric more often than the apparent.

The first comic I ever read was an 'X-Men' themed anti-smoking PSA they gave out in health class when I was about 10.

In 2003, as a 21-year-old convert to Islam, I moved from Colorado to Cairo to see what life was like in a Muslim country.

Anytime you're writing stories about a group of people with whom you have limited experience, there's a lot of guesswork.

Real tolerance means respecting other people even when they baffle you and you have no idea why they think what they think.

I think lot of Muslims have gotten fatigued by the way Muslim characters, even 'positive' ones, are portrayed in the media.

In Arab Islamic society, it is traditionally taboo to criticize the lifestyle or personal philosophy of any practicing Muslim.

you can't really separate modernity from history or spiritual concerns from mundane ones. Everything feeds into everything else.

I'm writing in English; I'm writing for a Western audience, but the people I'm surrounded by in my daily life are mostly non-white.

There's a burden of representation that comes into play when there aren't enough representatives of a certain group in popular culture.

The more you put out there, the more you have to resolve. 'Air' is the most literary comic I've written so far, and that poses problems.

I think people, especially in the Muslim community, are rightly cautious any time you hear, 'Oh, there's going to be a Muslim character.'

I think comics are really part of The Zeitgeist. They reflect back to us the issues that we're concerned about in the time they are written.

We don't want to create a literary ghetto in which black writers are only allowed to write black characters and women writers are put on 'girl books.'

It took me a long time to square with the fact that none of my experiences are typical - I'm not a typical American, but I'm also not a typical Muslim.

I'm not a programmer myself, but I am a very, very picky end user of technology. I like my machines to work they way they're supposed to, all the time.

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