Nyu alumni as well as the faculty and General Community as well. It is a pleasure to be hosting tonight. Welcome back to nyu it is a pleasure to have you here. We will have time later for questions and answers and a book signing. I want to start the evening i giving a brief introduction. Very active since graduating so i dont need to cover everything that i will leave it up to him to fill in the gaps. Currently a senio senior fellowd director of the Development Center for global studies, policy, excuse me. He is a commentator and broadcaster who wishes he could be a writer, and i think you are, so i very much enjoy your writing. Among other things, hes the Muslim Leadership Initiative at the institute and has appeared on Major Networks and the essays and reviews have been published at the washington post, the times, cnn, the guardian, foreignpolicy. Author of a novel published by penguin in 2006 and tonight event is the launch of his new book out to b how to be a musd american story. Published by beacon press in boston and we thank them for helping us make this event happen. A bit more about haroon he was previously a fellow at the Law School Center and a fellow at the National Security studies program at the new america foundation. He served as director of Public Relations at the Islamic Center here at nyu from 2007 to 2009. Haroon moghul holds an m. A. At the south Asian Studies from Columbia University where he is currently a phd candidate. You can tell us more about that. His field of study includes muslim nationalism, colonial and postcolonial politics and the indian ocean economy. I think that this sort of different than your previous work. This is a very personal book, so im going to leave it at that. If i may, it is a pleasure to welcome Haroon Moghul and we will talk a bit later and have time for questions and answers. Thanks so much. [applause] iem pretty loud so i dont know if i need the microphone but you might since you are recording. Cameras follow me everywhere. Its called being a muslim. You cannot laugh. I want to read a section of the book that covers the president because i saw it coming so i thought it would be a nice gesture. I asked the publisher if we could change the subtitle in case i flew to canada but they were not amenable. The section im going to read one that is terrifying to me because when you write something obviously there are things that have a constant search for that happy middle ground. This book is very personal and it took a lot out of me to write. I come from a very conservative family religiously speaking and i talk about a lot of things that i dont think my family would have been particularly excited about the talking about so i had a weeklong panic attack whether i should invite my family to the readings because it would be rude not to but then if i read the book out loud if only be parts of the family so it was a very exciting balance. It was before i started nyu. I was not a muslim kid they thought. When i got to the kitchen i found my parents waiting in ambush. My father fired first. Why did you have a girl in your car yesterday. My eyes went wide. My face compensated with confusion and disbelief as if i didnt know what one was. To define the female as a species near embarrassment would have surrendered them from the interrogation. As it turns out someone had snatched on the switch there ofe were only two in my entire town one of which belonged to my family and the other to the president whose family was the only muslim family in town, the two cruisers were the same color with brown paneling. Since the president s wif presiy mother were both heads carved you can imagine the confusion they look the same to me so to their cars. I decided to own it partway. I said she needed a ride home and seems offering a girl a ride home is a trespass may be bad and that alone was the reason for the panic in my eyes. I folded a waffle and having shoved it in my mouth washing it down with a glass of chocolate milk. It was nothing i said, but i have been sloppy and i would have to pursue with even greater deception. Mcdonalds never called back so i found another job that would be easier to hide a softening the blow. It might have been unethical and possibly illegal. I help students write their thesis papers from scratch. Technically i didnt graduate High School One but several times. I profited in order to pay for a life to try to escape from it. I walked past her every morning. My friends teased me for not making out with her and i wondered why i held back even as i knew i was scared that there was an absence of opportunity. Her friend presented one by announcing a pool party at the end of may which i knew i had to attend i would make my move then and there but of course her house had to be decided president s which meant he might see my car that was also his car. A risk to take two weeks before prom not enough however to drive over it. I asked my friend to be derived. She was a bright kid that in the course of senior year difficult a habit of falling asleep during a briefing. Bright enough to post on his waits for for a while but the warning signs were there. He deemed most of his life to unimportant to be present for and he wore oversized sweater is looking like his mother got him lost. Also in case you forgot he was asleep but not when driving to get his mom took a liking to me. She wasnt particularly religious but always asked me to find him a nice jewish girl as if stranded in connecticut i had a special access to jewish women that she lacked. On the way to the party naturally his nose started bleeding so badly that we drove right past sams house almost to massachusetts and the closer we got to canada for further we were from harm. No luck. He practically ran it into a lawn and did a face plant as he sprinted to the biggest tree on the lawn. It took me a while to realize he was repurposing napkin that pind then we met a homeowner that shared after we explained why the plurality of the semites were watching their face while laughing and falling over. I ended up the nigh tonight is y where i wanted to be, on her pool deck with carla, her beautiful legs, blind children know how to wal block it is an instinct inside of them. The right time and place comes to the surface. Some reached entirely around my cowardly impediment of resolve and shoved it to the floor. Ive never felt so overcome but heres the thing, but some radar i didnt kno know why had i coud sense that she wanted at the same. The energy hung in the air and we were opposite ends of a magnet. I just reach over, put my arms around her and watched her moms Station Wagon pull up. He jumped away from each other. I walked her to the car with a mere consolation as she made her way to the back she offered me her hand in apology. There was so much in the grasp i fear i spent my entire life trying only to return to the squeeze. Somewhere i could be held with someone instead of just myself. I let my parents to believe that on a friday night the first week of june, convenient, i would sleep over at a friends house, his friends mom conspired with me as did everyone else to leave school early on the data from one had to have provincial permission, both parents gave theirs. My income and you dont need to ask. So a little more than the conclusion of the day i crossed over to my friend friends home, showered and shaved and returned in time for the evenings events. Jacobs neighbors were on vacation so i parked my land cruiser not merely in the backyard under the deck so i wouldnt speak the same mistake twice. At jacobs house i finally relaxed. I was going to get away with this. We went to the backyard and posed for the camera. You actually got to live in a moment and said that watching yourself live in it a few seconds later. Every student went out of his way to congratulate me amazed that i needed more encouraged i wanted to attend in the first place. Everyones belief system appreciated the consolidation and i wanted affairs so that one day i wouldnt need it. I got rejection letters between Boston University and nyu i picked the latter. All good things must come to an end. Ive never seen many of my classmates again or we again. It was like it never happened. We slow danced to Sarah Mclachlan which i cant listen to now without breaking out in goosebumps. I still ask myself why she needs to know we havent done anything wrong and why i was receiving this from all places. Leading to the kingdom that never dies it tastes better than. But it has no average ill send. Tempted by the desire to live forever, yes, he failed and falls but only in fall when does he become for you is meant to be. Maybe we missed the point of the story all along. You can do the wrong thing for the right reasons. They ate from the tree but they repented and stuck together. I was a 17yearold who wanted more than anything to be long to believe there was a world he could just be a part of that he didnt need to analyze from without or to be excommunicated from to let the stars circle me, the occasional bracelets, the wallet tucked on the chained to a belt loop these were the tribal markers of a snowboarder. It was announcing it was sticking out to fit in. We could want what others want because they want it and still want it for ourselves. Sometimes we are not able to point to where our desired ends. After prom we might have stopped at friendlys but i cant remember. Carla wanted nothing to do with me. The last thing she said as he cant drink youve got to drive. The next afternoon carla chose instant messenger to shock the we should break up, i typed and agreed and died. I did not expect this would end even as i made plans to go away for college. You can hold up the hopes in your head woul but still be devastated when one of them gives way. Its wanting to have your cake and eat it too. I drove with my parents tonight after prom to see my family. I sat broken in the backseat. My mom would pass away less than a decade away. My father is still with us another decade after that i couldnt admit to them that money and run around of them failed. We never moved beyond our first case. While i trembled to meet her lips she told me in detail what intimacies she would and wouldnt be okay with and i nodded as if this was a subject that i have mastered. For me on the ideas of marriage once and forever i believed that it was noted different. Once we were together we would remain together. Terminology with technicality so i was ruined like i couldnt believe. Its one thing not to go to prom and another to be dumped the day that you pull off the greatest deception. If every person has a great test mine was and may still be parting. I learned i could deal with death but i couldnt accept that god would let wives become entangled to be ripped apart. How could you live forever and be a part forever. A real end without resurrection and a place where islam cant go doesnt help stop working. Had carla not broken up with me that i had broken up with her. They say the more you can contain from which i learned this lesson the further you let a person into your soul the longer it takes for them to leave. I couldnt guess how long it would take but i had stupidly given away all of my heart presuming the future existed while the present was still coming together. I stopped by her house to pick up a good friend although he was on the other side of town. Jeremy who was also on the other side of town that behind me. None of this made sense but probably because all i was focused on and all i could see is carla at the top of the stairs putting dishes away. She might have waved. We ended up across from each other at a diner in connecticut. Jeremy laughed as we walked back to my car. He said that is the longest conversation youve ever had with her. Maybe i should ask her out. I never spoke with her or saw her again. Some overlap and some are a pa part. I do not know what they need to mean in this universe. My religion is a man shouldnt be alone with a woman but a man shouldnt be so alone that he needs to be with a woman to be like her life is worth living. All of them she provided to the universe i otherwise felt misplaced by. From the first time she offered her as a skating rink to the last when we left the dance floor it may be you hated things it is good for you beyond my desire for her was in loneliness feeling only briefly interrupt interrupted. It was no life at all. This made the world stark and beautiful but it haunted and the person would be. Something always comes from nothing and with every difficulty there is relief. It could be this is me or all of us and we stumbled onto the places that we live but do not ever belonged to her for me to be taught this mercy we do not be long here. [applause] i got dumped a day after prom, yes. If i may start the qanda part of the evening, i want to refer to an article published in the atlantic. The article is titled to be a political muslim in america some of the books how to be a muslim tries out a new genre of writing about islam. Tell us a little bit about what brought you to write a different kind of book. The book is titled how to be islam and the first review of the book was pretty positive at the end of never answered the question. Theres some confused people and then people giving their kids the book on prayer so theres going to be an exciting overlap. When i came to nyu in 1998, this bookstore wasnt here. I had a very tenuous connection and i grew up in a very small christian town which was a lovely town and i wanted to come to a big city in new york. You have to whittle it down in size. I basically debate between joining the foundation of islam or the muslim club and it was a dance party and i cannot dance. Its why i joined at nyu. They come from honest explanations of important things to. I know different people that are muslim and i thought to myself i may not be a particularly religious person that i can help to build a religious community and need a few kids. We were like is now an institution into something completely different than anyone has ever seen before because it isnt going to be about a certain type of muslims who come in. In. We were not challenging anyone we just said if you are identified as islam, you can come into the door. Im going to go after that and if i cant become a doctor i have to become a lawyer. And this is like salvation eugenics. We do not let people reproduce unless they have certain type of vehicles in their garages. No one will marry you unless you can afford a mercedes or a bmw. If you think about it here kind of likyourekind of like fascist slightly less intimidated. It is just not as scary. So, i am still answering your question, i promise to be i told myself its fine. We can do this and they will go to law school and who cares if they built the club. I was elected president for my senior year and i celebrated by asking a girl out. I wrote a poem and decided to read it to her in starbucks down broadway im sure you passed it many times. I am asking the girl out and halfway through reciting the poem. I asked a friend to do research and this friend completely failed and i think now he runs this development. My third day was 9 11. I am a 21yearold kid that is incredibly shy and awkward and did not know how to handle himself in the settings. It is constantly commenting about islam and having to defend your identity to explain where you are. It was something to do with violence if you are a tourist or you are not. It doesnt really tell the story about what they go through. That makes a very long answer to your question. Im going to open up for any questions. Hold on and i will bring you the microphone. Have you familiarize yourself with mystical writers . In the book i talk about a few people depending on how you want to define this new. Towards the end of the buck. I tried to pick up the pieces and makeup as a person that had promised on paper how did i end up like driving my car into a ditch and try to make sense of that. Dont worry it is not a painful memory i can write about it and laugh. Im doing okay. Im a happy person. My mom passed away in thi and ts one of those things we call irony. There were 16 women who let me actually go backwards on that. My grandfather and on up were religious scholars. They spoke arabic and persian. My grandfather was interesting as a conservative, but he would have been completely he would have laughed or been disgusted by the kind of things that happened because it would have made no sense to him. He wrote poetry and spoke english. He did yoga and it used to be very common. So what is interesting a is he d seven daughters but no sons. He raised them all to be educated women. It was a very fortunate and common patriarchy because in my moms family all women outshine their husbands like you dont even know they are in the room sometimes. My mom was one of only 16 in the entire country way back in the day so she became a radiation oncologist. I was the only in seattle at a Dinner Service with people one of them was amazed that my mom was educated because it makes you wonder what people think of you. My mom was a radiation oncologist and she died of cancer. She loved eddie vedder said she thought pearl jam and kind of connected those two things. A question as to talk about your vulnerabilities and failures and its not an easy thing to do and you mentioned the panic you had. Can you talk about the process that you had to get to where you want today . About a month ago, my boss, we were talking about this earlier. People are going to read this. Rachel is like a jewish mom so she read the book and just kind of wants to start crying that she cant because shes my boss but she looked at me like she wanted to give me a hug and felt bad for me. They are like the same ethnic group and there is a real convergence. Book is what kept me going because there was this idea. Working on this in the years long project because i have th this. It requires you to kind of be there for a certain way i want to start by saying i love the way you say the word pakistan. It sounds very much like it and i have this is a little unrelated to your buck. Keeping aside the. In todays times there is a fine line between balancing the religious responsibilities and not all of us seemed to live up to that idea of being a muslim and idyllic when you go out into society where people that are not muslim look at you and feel like if you are muslim why are you doing abc based on your experience how do you deal with not feeling like you are living up to that idea with a checklist would you still be okay with it and feel like you are a muslim and that is okay. No one can identity need coke to find your identity and make you whatever you want and you still have a choice. Its a good idea to keep the seat next to you open. Ive learned a few of them a look in arabic it can be anything. You open a book in arabic and its like as it hits the subway. I will answer the question. What i think is. If you just accept i am who i am and nothing is in need of improvement, then you become a kid terrible wicked person. Im fine as is but why would you ever want to live a life where you were perfectly fine. Im sure it is an acrosstheboard but then people create an external standard. If it is too far away from you is going to crush you. Does that make sense . If it is important to you, the thing that you aspire to should be enough that it forces you to become better a but not so much that it becomes a burden and that is for you to decide and at a certain point i think for me this is my own personal journey and they realize what another definitions of how i should be isnt actually making me a better person. It isnt going to make you a better person. So if you feel worse about yourself i dont know if that makes sense. Someone can say im having difficulty with this aspect of it so i would be interested to know how you are dealing with it. They can buy the book. No more questions. Okay. I do have a question. Back to the title how to be a muslim. Can you talk a little bit about your own personal process and how you see yourself today . The title is more profound wd because of where we live. My initial choice of the title was one tongueincheek hell to be a muslim as if it is a howto manual which i thought was funny but also because like the womans question that you asked. The door would make you want to leave the United States because port authorities. So laguardia is like the entire. Its like the donald trump airports. Then its like as a muslim versus why would you be a muslim and most were people of faith or question is how to do nothing and it is a constant struggle and its a good thing and a bad thing and the volatility of why it is important to me. And i wanted to capture some of that. It is injunctive like i am this or that. What is interesting to me about and why you is i can study philosophy because i want to make sense of the world around me. I love my philosophy major. Like none of the thinkers i studied. Could even make sense of my classmates religiosity. It was like we are going to define the entire planet but we cant even make sense of how most americans live their life which is a kind of liberal bubble that produces the condescension or the rest of america. And so, there was a point to this but i completely lost it. The point of conjunction i found, i still find catholicism to be really interesting and inspirational. I can be this or that or different elements to my personality and they may not always connect, but they do connect and i think that we live in an age where there are a lot of people that want everyone to live in certain silos. So you are american or muslim, you are that kind of thing. And i reject that. I just called the whole philosophy stupid. Some other people that but ht joined us i just want to make sure. Any other questions before we go back. The big question is the religion versus technocrats. Thats the same question. Why would you ask me that right now . Even the cspan guy is looking at me right now. They learn the latest technology because you are a part of the movement. You need to take care of your spiritual self. The achievements of western civilization, wonder woman was a great movie. I love new york sometimes. There was a couple behind us running the commentary the entire movie. Like thats a greek mythology. Like what is he going to say now. There was a guy playing candy crush. Like you paid for this ticket. Where is this compelling need that you need to play candy crush. I guess what im saying is a lot of Times Technology has unique outcomes also amplifies the we are inside. It doesnt necessarily bring about a new world just amplifies the tensions that are already in society. I also think that a lot of technologies have a belief about the human tools to change human beings and so we saw in the election trigger basically one. It was interesting like someone completely crushed. That was amazing. We dont think about how it can be used to. Do we have any other questions . Would you like to read another small piece from the book plaques yes because i totally prepared to read and do right now. How long am i supposed to read for . I am a brown man with a microphone, i dont know if you know how this works. Uncle is a term for someone that is not related to you and its your daughter. She got up on the microphone and talked for 45 minutes start to finish 45 minutes. Someone went up to try to take the microphone and he started yelling at that person and it was the greatest thing i have seen because people were screaming at each other. Yes. Years after my family went to connecticut i had a chance to go back. My mother was buried in a cemetery and when i finished reading the chapter for her i drove 15 minutes in the wrong direction to see what had become of the place we lived together for so long it had been four years since she passed. I had just begun to hit turbulence and i was rattled enough that something before her empty for us to hold onto. In a metal camry i drove down to accelerate to the second left up the hill down to the end. I reached the culdesac to what was once our driveway to the no trespassing signs. A man is not only alone when hes with a woman i look at all of the rooms i imagined to the redefining. Until these replacements in the room next to me the homeowners would exclaim and i finally belong somewhere and when it seemed like i had it all figured out, karla closed the door on my face. Too bad when i was falling to bits. I felt the same way forced by the circumstances. I gues guess it wasnt guess t e and there was nothing i could do fulltime would permit me to build a life there as i preferred reaching everywhere. I grew concerned at the fact of having to leave and desperately search other places to live besides america and i tried hard for istanbul for example the no such luck. Standing outside of terminal number one being surprised at how familiar the greatest blows were yet to come. My career had just been interrupted. Once back i applied positions hoping to get something that would allow me to finish my dissertation before the clock ran out but i received almost no responses. While i wanted to complete my project the perspectives for which is good and defended i could not. There was no way that i could dedicate the time and the energy to write the chapters to complete the research necessary to sit in the library for hours on end and i had to cobble together enough assignments and speaking projects just to address the debt. Maybe they just made its workers and maybe i would be stuck in the same jobs none of them adding up to one proper job. Maybe i would be back on another bridge and at this time it would stop me. When i received the invitation from the Public Affairs council to speak at the los angeles conference i told myself i wanted to go and maybe i did but more importantly, i had to. The hamster was back on his wheel. They danced around the almost exact same topic of this spring. It was now 2013 and the empire was strikinempirewas striking b. The day that i flew out its whitewashed the middle east. Look, i if was dressed up like a christmas ornament. Global warming, someone asked, or the end of days. Yes, i responded. If you are expecting an epiphany you might want to stop reading. It took me 20 years to begin a synthesis. I wouldnt come from the clothes i put on some of the women i was with were the drinks i drink for a man that had to star in movies to get himself out of the door i could think of no better place than los angeles. Thank you. I dont know what that means. thank you very much. I do remember that snowstorm. It was quite a scene for those of you at the time. Thank you so much all of you for being here i also want to wish to you celebrating ramadan thank you for joining us we will continue with a book signing. The books are on sale 20 off. Just keep in mind we are closing at 8 p. M. Tonight. Thank you so much and have a good evening. Good night. The title of my book free women and three men. This has got to stop. I noticed wherever i go in the portal actually got women are very unhappy. The unhappiness is due to the huge systemic changes that women for thousands of years had their own world. There was the world of women into the world of men and this is a brandnew experiment to have this new system where now women can be economically independent on a father or husband or brother they are working sidebyside in the workplace and this is an experiment thats never happened before. The idea that if we can suppress man enough, women will be happy. It is on the basis of my own experience whats women have lost is the solidarity that they had when they totally rule that the private sphere. It was a huge tribal experience and now it is a sense of isolation and loneliness in this connection from their function. Stop blaming men. I dont think it had anything to do with feminism or anything like that. Women suddenly felt a surge of happiness again from being with other women. You could actually see it in the office he when this is washed up. He awakes to the sound of girls and womens voices laughing and singing and so on going down to do the laundry on the shore and that is exactly what was going on up until very recently when women altogether they did the chores together, they did the laundry, the cooking. I can remember this in my childhood. Described as a small child in italy they would get together to do the laundry and go up the hill and the singing. Even though people were laboring physically in the agrarian era, there was a happiness and a sense of identity, no place for an independent thinker. There was no option except to become a nun. Every book has an origin story along with every collaboration so how did you meet . It is a good story this is really an arranged marriage. The city in the fourth of asia at the time wanted to replicate what he had done internationally as a book proposal that had really inspired many people tha