Links Mentioned in This Episode:

• Under the Full and Crescent Moon (Novel)

The Resilient Writers Radio Show: Interview with Aamir Hussain– Full Episode Transcript

Intro:

Well, hey there, Writer. Welcome to The Resilient Writers Radio Show. I'm your host, Rhonda Douglas. And this is the podcast for writers who want to create and sustain a writing life they love. 

Because let's face it, the writing life has its ups and downs, and we want to not just write, but also to be able to enjoy the process so that we'll spend more time with our butt-in-chair getting those words on the page. 

This podcast is for writers who love books and everything that goes into the making of them. For writers who want to learn and grow in their craft and improve their writing skills. Writers who want to finish their books and get them out into the world so their ideal readers can enjoy them. Writers who want to spend more time in that flow state. 

Writers who want to connect with other writers to celebrate and be in community, in this crazy roller coaster ride, we call the writing life. We are resilient writers. We're writing for the rest of our lives and we're having a good time doing it. So welcome, Writer. I'm so glad you're here. Let's jump right into today's show.

Rhonda:

Well, hey there, Writer. Welcome back to another episode of The Resilient Writers Radio Show. Today, I have with me Aamir Hussain—and Aamir has many things. He’s North American from Canada. He’s also South Asian from Pakistan. And he is a published author with his first, his debut novel out today, Under the Full and Crescent Moon.

Aamir:

I can show it. I got my author’s copy, so—

Rhonda:

Oh, great. I love it. It’s beautiful. I love the cover. Isn’t it gorgeous? It’s absolutely gorgeous. Like it just—

Aamir:

Inverted, unfortunately. But yeah, I’m very happy with what the publisher did. And they were very kind. It’s all the publisher’s decisions about what goes on the cover, but they did take my input and there was a little bit of back and forth. But they did—I think, I think they did a really nice job with it.

Rhonda:

That’s gorgeous.

Aamir:

Yeah. And I feel like it is so important for a cover to give the reader a clue of what’s inside. And I feel like they’ve just hit the nail on the head. So, Aamir, where did this book start for you? Like, how did you end up writing this novel?

Aamir:

Yeah. So it’s a long story because it did take me a long time to get it out. But a lot of it came from just me reflecting on my upbringing and my faith, especially, unfortunately, in the wake of 9/11, when there was a lot of criticism of my faith. I’m Muslim.

So—and I spent too much time online. So online—especially in Canada—I’ve been very lucky that in Canada, especially since I live in the Greater Toronto Area, I didn’t get almost any real-world sort of blowback from everything that was happening around that time. But online there was plenty.

There’s a lot of people from all different walks of life who were becoming incredibly critical of Islam for understandable reasons. There had been, you know, the attacks on the Twin Towers back then. And I know for a lot of people, it’s bizarre to think that for a lot of adults now that hadn’t even happened when they were born.

But for us, certainly in our age group, it was a huge deal. And the reaction to it went in a direction where all Muslims were blamed or all Muslims were expected to apologize for it and condemn it and all of those sorts of things.

And it expanded to actually just critiquing the very fundamentals of the faith as being incredibly backward and completely misogynistic and all of those sorts of things. And I took those comments seriously—in terms of, well, let me look into it—especially because, as I say in my bio, from my personal family, we were born in Pakistan.

There was nothing in there that I felt to be misogynistic. All of the women in my family—my sister, my cousins, and my aunt and my mother herself—are incredibly accomplished. And it’s not despite their faith, it’s because of it, as a part of it. There was no correlation between how faithful they were and are and how successful they are in all of the same ways that the men in my family are.

So that conflict between how Islam was being portrayed and how I grew up is kind of what led me to think about my faith very deeply. And from that came the idea of, like, could there be a Muslim matriarchy? And the answer to that, as I delved into my own faith, was: there’s nothing keeping that from happening.

Um, but to be fair to people who are critics of Islam in general, I did also grow up in Saudi Arabia—because my father worked there in the oil and gas industry. And in the early ’80s and ’90s, which is when I grew up, it was all of the stereotypes that you kind of think about when you think about how backward and repressive and misogynistic Islam is considered to be.

Saudi Arabia in those days really did fall within the stereotype—like women weren’t allowed to drive, women weren’t allowed to go outside without a male relative, all of those sorts of things.

So I grew up being very aware that there are very different understandings of how to be Muslim. And that led me to investigate my faith. And from those investigations, the idea that you could have a Muslim matriarchy—I don’t know where that thought came from, but it kind of stuck in my brain and it kept on building in on itself.

And everything that I found out just kind of confirmed that to be true. And from there came the…conviction that if I wanted to communicate what I was finding, it kind of had to be a story.

Rhonda:

Right. And is it fair to call it speculative or fantasy, or like, where would you place it?

Aamir:

I had a very hard time figuring out the genre, and my publisher helped me with that. And, you know, there was a little bit of confusion there as well from their perspective—well, not a confusion, but they picked it up. But then they are the ones—especially my acquiring editor, Julia Kim—she’s the one, I think, who suggested it be in the genre of—because I just wrote the thing, didn’t know what genre it was—she suggested “speculative historical,” and that fits.

Rhonda:

That’s my favorite genre. That’s like—I will read anything in that genre. Yeah.

Aamir:

Perfect. Perfect. Perfectly, exactly for you. So it is—the most historical thing about it is the time period it is set in. It’s a very specific time in history for various reasons, but the actual setting itself, the city of Madid al-Agham, is completely invented.

It’s set in a kind of an imaginary place—pretty much Mediterranean, I think, is the closest I come to situating it in the real world. But I did that in order to give myself free rein to just create a brand-new society and a brand-new possible branch of history kind of a thing without interfering with any real people or any real place.

Rhonda:

And your protagonist—is it Khadija? I have that right? Khadija. Khadija. How—so you’re a man, you’re writing a female protagonist. Did you have any challenges with that? Did you get any feedback from anyone? Like, how did you deal with writing outside of your own gender identity in this case?

Aamir:

Yeah, it was actually incredibly stressful, as it were, because initially I was keeping the fact that I was writing a novel and I was researching all of these things—I kept it completely under wraps because I didn’t know if I could do it. If I didn’t know if I could pull it off, I didn’t want to tell anybody about it, which is an approach which might not be the best approach, but that’s what I did.

So as a part of that, after I wrote my first five chapters—I think prologue plus first five chapters, or prologue plus first four, I don’t remember—once I got into the opening of the book—was complete, essentially.

That’s when I started—and I, you know, at that time I was kind of obsessively editing it as well. Like, I was reading it every time I wrote a little bit more; I went back and edited it. So it was fairly polished, it felt like. Once I got that part of the book done is when I started telling my family and friends about it—that I’ve done this thing.

And that is when I actually sent it out to—basically, I guess they were beta readers, but they were basically just my family and friends who were willing to put up with it and say, “Okay, fine, we’ll read it,” and humor me. And they were mostly women, and they had no notes, as it were, on the first five chapters.

Rhonda:

Oh, really? Okay. That’s great.

Aamir:

So that is what gave me the confidence and conviction that I’ve got the voice right, at the very least. And it was still a concern, because then after that I went kind of radio silent for, like, honestly, like a decade—in terms of where I was plugging away at the manuscript. And after it was complete is when I sent it out to more people. And this was very kind of my friends who did read the whole thing all the way through.

And they also didn’t have any pushback at all. And I had some fairly direct questions, because there’s some things about women growing up in there as well, because this is more of a—it’s got a lot of different topics in it, but I wanted this to be a growing-up story.

And for Khadija growing up as a young woman, there’s a lot—even more specific things that I do not have any lived experiences of. And even that—there wasn’t any pushback, and there weren’t notes or critiques like, “You should—this doesn’t make sense,” or “That doesn’t make sense,” or “This really doesn’t happen that way.” There was none of that.

Rhonda:

Lucky you.

Aamir:

It’s just—I—that was an incredible worry of mine, but yeah.

Rhonda:

You know, when we’re writing outside of an identity, all we can do is get the feedback.

Aamir:

Yes.

Rhonda:

So, you mentioned that you went radio silent for a decade. How long did it take you to do the first draft? And then how long were you working on it in terms of revisions?

Aamir:

So that is the thing. Um, it’s hard to say now just because it’s been so long. Like, in terms of—let’s forget my research, because it was fairly intensive research, and that research was really— that research was happening before I even was convinced that it had to be a novel.

The earliest timestamp that I have on a file—and this is more like, you know, this is like the little snippet of the book that I set aside to actually show to people that I was talking about earlier—is from 2015.

So—and then I have a very clear memory that after I wrote the prologue, I stopped for a long time because it was—this is—and then after I—the first—

Rhonda:

Why? What was going on there? What was going on there that made you stop after you wrote the prologue?

Aamir:

Well, a lot of it is just—I think it was just like a mental thing where I felt accomplished and then I just stopped. Like, “I’ve done it,” kind of thing. Like something in my brain said, “Oh, I wrote the prologue,” and the prologue is pretty nice. Like, it’s got a little bit of a twist in there.

Um, and I think I pulled off— it was almost like a short—it’s almost like a short story. It’s not really; it’s more of a setting thing, but essentially I always wanted it to have a certain kind of feel, and I got it, and it has a little twist about, like, setting up the world in the end.

And then my brain kind of went like, “Okay, I’m done,” sort of a thing, and then I had to kind of force myself in, like, a little bit later. And again, like, I’ve got a full-time job, you know, family things—all of those sorts of things that are happening at the same time—and the book was always just this kind of a tickle in the back of my mind. And it just—I managed to scratch the itch, let’s say, and it kind of grew again after a little while. And then after that I wrote the first five chapters, and then I stopped again.

But at that point it was sort of like—it was kind of getting a little bit ridiculous in my own mind. Like, okay, if I’m serious about this, then I kind of have to, like, do this—not full-time, but dedicate a lot more time to it. So it was from 2017 when I became, I would say, serious about it, and ended in 2022 is—my first draft complete is very roughly the timeline that I had.

Rhonda:

Oh wow.

Aamir:

And you know, I’m doing this on—you know, this is pre-COVID, most of it. This was done—I had like a pretty long commute working downtown Toronto. So I did a lot of it—I did a lot of my research on the TTC, going on the subway downtown. And I did a lot of the writing on the GO Train because at that time I’d moved, right?

Like, you know, there’s all of these things happening—I’m moving and getting married, you know—I have a growing family. I have two boys now. So all of these things are happening at the same time. And those are things that take up a lot of time.

Rhonda:

They take a lot of time and energy.

Aamir:

They take a lot of time. So I did my research on the TTC, I did my writing on the GO Train, and I finished it off during lockdown—that’s a thing. And then after that, like once I finished the first draft, it was kind of faster for me to go through the revision process. And within about a year I went through—I took breaks, because after I finished the book, I think I took a couple of months’ break as well.

Like, my first draft—even though it was very unfinished and I knew it was very unfinished—I took a couple of months’ break and then I went back and I did about—I—second revision took a fair, decent amount of time. But then the third took less time and the fourth took even less time.
And that is when I started handing it out to my friends. So I would say, 2017 to 2022: serious writing. And by the end of 2022, I had my draft that I was happy with.

Rhonda:

What—I mean, I mentioned I absolutely love this genre—historical speculative, like “what if this happened back in this period of time?” You know, it gives you so much room to explore things. Um, were there any challenges for you in writing in this genre? Or was the amount of research that you had done basically, like, in your—did it do any of the challenges of writing in that genre?

Aamir:

Well, yeah. I mean, I think it was because I had, I guess, done the hard—well, some of the hard work up front—because I was grappling with some pretty weighty matters about, like, “Is my faith even real?” It’s pretty heavy-duty stuff. And I took every critique of the faith seriously, essentially.

And, like, I have a lot of cousins who are now basically either lax or ex-Muslims and all that sort of stuff. And that was an avenue that was completely open to me. My family and my extended family are, you know, not rigid in that way at all.

So, in terms of all of that—in terms of me trying to understand why Saudi Arabia is the way it is, why Afghanistan is the way it is, why Pakistan is the way it is, and why my family is the way it is—trying to understand all those things kind of put the major blocks of the world and the plot in place already.

So the research came first in this case, and then the design of the world and the plot and what would happen all came out of that. So I had a lot more work to do after that in terms of—um—the time period was the most important, because Islamic law—

Because the other thing: not only did I try to create a Muslim matriarchy—which is kind of, you know, you can just say, “Hey, it’s a Muslim matriarchy,” and not delve deeper into it—I also tried to make it compliant with Islamic law, sharia.

Rhonda:

Oh, okay.

Aamir:

Yeah, and a part of that also was because every one of these things became, like, these scary Arabic words, which we still suffer from today. Like, you know, sharia is scary. Fatwas are scary. All of these sorts of things are just—these are just things that are thrown out as, like, “Obviously Islam is incompatible with the West,” which is a kind of a thing which I really, really dislike as a bit of accepted wisdom, but it is an accepted wisdom a lot of times. 

And, you know, these things like, “Oh man, they’re trying to put sharia law in here,” and “These fatwas are evil,” kind of a thing are also things that I grappled with in my research.

So the main character is actually a writer of fatwas. And so she is herself somebody who is authorized to write fatwas—are called muftis. So all of this is in the book. And one of the things that I’m kind of actually happy about that I managed to do is I managed to stretch the book out and just plug in all of these different details and explain them throughout the book just as a part of the plot.

So one of the other things— I think everybody can judge for themselves whether I did a good job of, like, just throwing all of these different terms and terminology in there or not—but I have gotten some very kind reviews about that as well.

But all of those kind of scary things, I kind of went into the history of those as well. Like, what is sharia? Because most Muslims don’t think about this sort of—so it’s like—just think about it like most people think about the Ten Commandments: kind of like a vague—“It’s nice; it’s got good stuff in it. Why wouldn’t you want to have a modern system of law incorporate some of these sensible ideas into it?”

And that’s what most Muslims think about sharia, because we don’t need to go into the history of it and the legal detail about how exactly sharia works and all of that sort of stuff. But I felt compelled to do that. And what I found was that it’s very boring.

The history of Islamic law is just very—it’s just like, people had to come up with laws and this is how they did it. And this is, like, the very dry, legalistic ways that they went about coming up with laws to run societies—and that’s about it. And communicating that was also something that became just a part of the plot of the novel.

Rhonda:

And, I mean, plotting—plotting an entire novel—did you plot, or were you pantsing it? Like, were you just writing as the protagonist led you and following her journey, or did you go back and put in all of these concepts? Or were you like, “I am plotting this thing with all the concepts,” you know? From—like, how did you approach that?

Aamir:

It was very heavily plotted. It was very heavily plotted. I had a very clear idea of how the main character would grow up, the kind of problems that she would have. And it’s kind of like multiple acts—sort of like, it’s not just one thing. It’s like a few different phases of her life as she kind of steps out of her shell. She starts as a very bookish introvert, which is a bit of me putting myself in there, I think.

And I had a very clear idea of the end. Like, there were a lot of plot problems that my mind just threw up and then solved itself, and they became a part of the design of the book. She was always going to be a mufti, a writer of fatwas. She was always going to have an opposing mufti who wrote opposing fatwas. And so that’s a part of the novel as well.

So—essentially—kind of like the legal cases that they were contending over—there’s, like, a little—there’s courtroom-ish scenes in there as well. There were all of these different things that were happening to her that made perfect sense for her journey and for the conflicts that she was dealing with.

The things in the middle were where a little bit of the pantsing came in. There were characters that showed up as they needed—because I had an understanding of who the main characters were, which is Khadija; her father; the main antagonist; Khadija’s mentor, an older lady named Fatima. All of these main characters were there.

And it was very important for me to have characters that refer to—actually three of the main female characters: the main character is named Khadija; one of her best friends is Aisha; and one of her mentors is Fatima. And these are references to historical figures who are basically giants in early Islamic history.

And it was very important for me to—they are not them, of course—but they are references to those very iconic and very important historical figures in early Islamic history. So those were all there.

But, like, the supporting characters that I needed to give different perspectives and to connect things—they were the ones who showed up, and they were the ones where it was basically pantsing, because when they showed up, they all had a job to do, and they did their job, but they did it with different personalities and different perspectives that really helped just glide through some of the less—I guess I would call them—not the major plot points, but getting to the major plot points and providing a different view of things for the main character to think about and consider.

Rhonda:

Yeah. So it was a mix of, you know, a lot of plotting and then a little bit of pantsing in the middle.

Aamir:

Yeah. Yeah. I would say that.

Rhonda:

Yeah. What’s your hope for the book now that it’s out in the world? Like, it’s—ah—it’s—what day is it today? It’s the 23rd, and this is pub day. So congratulations.

Aamir:

Thank you. Thank you. It’s available in Canada as paperback, and I think it’s available worldwide as of today. So it’s a bit overwhelming. I think I’m a bit overstimulated by it all.

Rhonda:

What’s your hope for the book?

Aamir:

I don’t know, really. I never—like, I don’t know if this is common for people you interview with—but I never set out to be a writer. It was just not a thing that I had ever thought of. It’s just—I had this idea that needed to be a novel, and then I’m like, “Oh, okay. Well, I got to do this now,” right? I’m kind of like—

Rhonda:

An accidental novelist is what you are.

Aamir:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the idea demanded it. So I was just, like, kind of followed along as I needed to. So I don’t know. I’m learning a lot about publishing over the last, let’s say, two years or so. I’ve learned a lot about publishing and the realities of it and, like, how that even works.

Because after I completed my novel at the end of 2022, I was like, “Well, what do I do now?” kind of a thing. And I was like, “Well… gotta try and get it published, I guess,” right? Because I did want people to read it. It wasn’t just, like, a personal project. It was something that I was— the first five chapters I’d given out to my family and friends; the completed manuscript I’d given out to my friends who were willing to sit through, like, 120,000 words.

And it was very nice of them. I’ve been very lucky that I’ve had those people in my life. And from now—I don’t know, because being realistic about it, a lot of people are writing. A lot of people are publishing. And that’s great to see. But, you know, selfishly speaking, it means that it’s very hard to get noticed as well.

So, in terms of that, I’ve been told that the next step really is that this will hopefully do well. It’s gotten some nice reviews, which I am incredibly grateful for. It’ll find its audience, however large it may be.

But it gets your name out there in preparation for your next book. And I’m like, “Man, it took me, like, 15 years to create this. I don’t know if I have another book in me. I’m not as young as I was when I started.” So I don’t—I really don’t know. I just want it to do—I just want it to find its readers, I think, basically the extent of it. And what comes of it—who can say?

Rhonda:

And are you hoping that non-Muslims have a different understanding of Islam as a result of engaging with this book?

Aamir:

I hope so. I hope so. I mean, when I was thinking about all of it—and I did a lot, and I did too much; that’s why my editor cut out, like, 40,000 words. So it’s not—it’s not 140,000.

Rhonda:

Wow. Okay, that’s a lot of words.

Aamir:

It’s a lot of words, and I’m grateful for it. It was kind of like a cold bucket of water thrown over you when she came back with her first comments, which were basically, like, just entire chapters ripped out, kind of a thing.

I kind of anticipated more than non-Muslims reading it, although I did try—I mean, I did try very hard to introduce a lot of concepts. It’s not like I wanted to just start out with a chapter about, “Well, this is what muftis do, and this is what sharia is,” or anything like that.

So I did try and drip out that information as it was needed—as it became important to the character and became important to what she was dealing with—little by little.

I was more thinking about, at that time, how somebody who has a different understanding of Islam might critique it. So I did a lot of work to kind of make it as solid as possible. Like, anticipating their critiques and then just buttoning all of that stuff up. Like, well, this is a Muslim matriarchy, a historical society—

How would the legal system especially work? Because that’s a part of the plot of the novel. But how would the economic system work, how would the political system work—and all of those sorts of things were something that I did a lot of work on.

And I think it makes the world feel solid, even though a lot of that was removed. It does make the world feel a lot more solid. I do hope that it leads to—both in terms of Muslim and non-Muslim audiences—what I hope it communicates more than anything else is that we’re all individuals.

We’re all different families. We’re all different communities. And we all come up with different understandings and interpretations because that’s just how we are as a species, frankly.

And so I do hope that non-Muslim readers read it and get an understanding of a bit of the depth of the richness of Islamic history and a bit of the understanding of how wide and diverse Muslims are—right? Because as I was writing the novel, I found a lot of other things that kept on confirming my initial intuitive understanding that there’s a lot of different kinds of Muslims out there.

Part of it was that there has been, within Muslim communities themselves, a push to say, like, you know, it’s not all the first days of Islam. It’s not all seventh-century Arabia. I’m from South Asia myself. You know, Muslim communities grew up differently in South Asia and then Southeast Asia and North Africa and all over the world. In fact, in Europe there’s a rich tradition of Muslims in Europe, especially around the Balkans area.

And they all grew up kind of isolated—a little isolated—from each other, but just because it was before the internet, before telegrams, before telephones, before email, and all of those sorts of things. Everybody grew up with their own traditions and their own cultures added on to the basic precepts of Islam.

And that is lost. And it’s lost not only because of this kind of non-Muslims looking at Islam and just flattening it to just, like, “Okay, well, everything I needed to learn about Islam I learned on 9/11,” kind of an idea—which is very—it’s still there and it still—it’s something that flares up.

It’s cyclical; it comes and goes—that idea of it. But there’s also a movement within Islam to say, like, we all have to act exactly the same. And if anybody steps out of line, then they’re not real Muslims and all of that sort of stuff. So it’s a conversation—it’s an attempt at a conversation or a pushback against that idea from both outside and inside Islam.

Rhonda:

It’s a tendency these days in all religions, isn’t it? To sort of say—you know, a kind of push to the fundamentals: like, “Everyone must be—” You know, I see it in the United States: “If you’re Christian, you must be this kind of Christian.” You know? So there’s—yeah—it’s funny how humans do that.

Aamir:

Yeah. And a lot of it is so transferable, right? Because there’s nothing—I’m hoping that it makes—there’s a tendency to make like, “Okay, well, that’s that part of the world. It’s all exotic and it’s all un-understandable.” Like, “I cannot even comprehend those people. Those people are just like that over there.”

And it’s just not true. Like, everybody’s human. And there are these same tendencies. The details are different, but the basics are the same. So there’s always going to be conservatives who are saying, “You have to be conservative.

You have to follow these laws as strictly as possible.” And there are always going to be people who push back against it. And there are always going to be people in the middle who just want to get on with their lives.

Rhonda:

Right, right.

Aamir:

So, unfortunately, because of a lot of instability in the world, Islam especially is a faith that gets caught in the crossfire a lot. And I really, honestly, personally think it’s just because there’s a lot of oil and a lot of trade routes where Muslims tend to be.

It’s just unlucky that way. Because all of these things are happening in a lot of different places in the world—the same exact dynamic—it’s just happening in a place where everybody wants to gain control.

And so it becomes convenient to just say, “Hey, those people—we need to protect them from themselves. We need to save their women,” which is another thing that’s really frustrating in all of this sort of stuff.

The experiences of my family and the women in my family just are completely erased. They don’t exist. It’s like my mother, who is a school principal and a teacher—that doesn’t even exist for people who say, “Oh, Islam is backward. We need to go there and show them civilization so that we save their women.” It’s like—my sister doesn’t need saving.

I’ve got doctors and engineers and artists and businesswomen in my family, in my extended family. And I see that everywhere—in my neighbors and, you know, in my extended circle of people. Like, I see dozens of—because I’m fairly—I’m still fairly an introvert—I know dozens of people who don’t need saving at all. And these narratives—both within the conservative Muslims and from outside places who just want to see a very, very conservative Islam—

They all push the same narrative: “Well, the women have no agency, and we need to go and save them from the outside,” and from the inside it’s like, “Yeah, women should have no agency. They should stay in the home,” kind of a thing.

Though they would, I’m sure, say differently about it. And my beef isn’t even with social conservatism. Like, if you are a socially conservative person—like, in my personal life, I’m very socially conservative—and if you want to promote a socially conservative lifestyle for your own community and within your own family for your own children, then you should have the perfect right to do that.

The problem comes when you try to impose it on other people and impose it on other families. So that is the dividing line for me. And I hope that the novel does at least a little bit to say, like, there’s a huge diversity out there.

Because conservatism kind of—for me, the biggest problem with imposing conservatism is that it attacks diversity because it demands uniformity. And I don’t think that’s very human.

Rhonda:

Yeah, and it makes everything so dull, because the richness of human experience gets erased, you know?

Aamir:

There are parts in the middle of the novel that I think you will really like.

Rhonda:

I’m sure I’m going to love it. Like I said, it’s my kind of thing. So, Aamir, you said, “Okay, this took me 15 years. I don’t know if I’m going to write another novel.” Do you think of yourself as a writer now? I mean, obviously you are a writer—how has getting a novel out into the world affected your identity?

Aamir:

I mean, the fact that I finished my first draft and people said they enjoyed it—like, you know, it might’ve been my family and friends just being kind—but, you know, they read the whole thing and they had questions about the whole thing, which is basically the point that you actually read it and you just didn’t say that you read it. That was a big step.

And then the fact that I found a publisher was a big step as well—as, like, a mark of confidence. Like, okay, you know what? This is—this is something that has some worth and value outside of just my own passion project. So those are kind of the big things. And now that the book is actually out in the world, it does—I mean, I can say I did it, right?

And I know there are so many people out there who have novels that are as good and better than mine, who are looking for an agent and looking for a publisher. 

And I just—I can’t help but be grateful that I managed to get lucky enough to find the right people to get it out into the world. So that’s a big part of it.

But in terms of my identity—yeah, I mean, I do now, because it’s a part of marketing the book and getting out there, which is another whole completely different phase of things. I have met other authors, and I have, like, friends who are authors now, which I didn’t have before. So I do think of myself as a novelist, as an author, and all of those sorts of things—because I have the proof.

Rhonda:
So there’s probably another one coming for you at some point.

Aamir:

Perhaps. Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, there is so much research that I did in this that anything else that I do would probably be easier, because any other—and I do have other ideas, right? I do have other ideas, and none of those ideas— they have their own complexities that I would like to do justice to.

But none of them are trying to push out as many ideas as this one did, because this one was chock-full of a lot of points that I’m trying to make. And also—not only am I trying to make certain points—I also don’t want the novel to be about that. And that was another thing that I was very worried about.

Rhonda:

That’s a delicate balance when you do so much research, right? The tendency is like, “Let me get all of this into the book,” but you can ruin a novel that way.

Aamir:

Yeah. Yeah. I did not want it to be preachy. I did not want it to be a lot of—what is it called? Show—I wanted to show, not tell. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I wanted to show, not tell. So those were all things that I was worried about.

And I think a large part of it that helped me was that I was a voracious reader as a child. I really loved reading and I just consumed books when I was younger. As I grow older, the time for that falls away. But I think all of that preparation kind of helped me find the rhythm for this book.

And any other book that I do write is not going to have to carry that burden that this one did, because they’re all—um—all the other ideas that I have are much more straightforward. But then the other problem becomes, like, I’m so used—this is the only novel I’ve written. You know, like, past performance is no guarantee of future success.

Because there was so much research in this one, and there were so many plot points that came out of those things that it just became like, “Okay, well, this will deal with that, this will deal with that,” and they’re all a part of the natural progression of Khadija’s—

It’s very specific: 11 months. This is 11 months in her life. And I did that for a very particular reason, too. So in these 11 months, there were a lot of things that were happening to her that were all very important from my research perspective as well.

When I’m thinking about something else, it doesn’t have that structure to it. So, like, the constraint that those ideas put in also meant that I had certain milestones that I could hit. There were certain beats that I knew were there. And anything else is going to be a lot more, I would imagine, character-driven—like, “Okay, this is only happening because it’s important to the character,” not because it’s this important, worldly thing that is also happening that has to be dealt with.

It’s going to be—I do want to write another novel, so I mean, I would say that. It’s not like I’m completely exhausted and all of it. Like—there’s a concept in Islam of saying in shā’ Allāh after everything, and that means “God willing.” It’s something that is one part of my faith that’s always deeply resonated with me.

Because it’s always felt to me to be very arrogant to make any sort of a plan for the future, because I don’t know what’s going to happen five minutes from now, let alone two years from now or anything like that. So saying in shā’ Allāh after everything just gives me that bit of humility and that little bit of comfort in saying, “Yeah, okay—there are two ideas that are knocking around in my head. I don’t know if anything will come of them, but in shā’ Allāh they will. And if they don’t, then that’s fine, too.”

Rhonda:

Yeah, that’s so great. All right, everyone—thanks so much for being with me today, Aamir. I really enjoyed this conversation. The book is Under the Full and Crescent Moon. You can find it wherever you get your books. So— all right. Thank you so much for being with me today, Aamir.

Aamir:

Thank you, Rhonda.

Outro:

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