Okay, we are going to start. Good evening everyone, thanks for joining us. My name is yael yisraeli, im the Community Relations manager at the nyu bookstore. This is an ongoing series that weve been having here for the past 70 years featuring nyu alumni like tonight with Haroon Moghul as well as nyu faculty and the General Community as well. Its a real pleasure to be hosting tonight Haroon Moghul who is an nyu along. Welcome back to nyu, pleasure to have you here. We are going to hear from haroon and then have time for questions and answers and a book signing. I want to start the evening by giving a brief introduction. Haroon, i think. Haroon has been very active since graduating from nyu so i dont know if i will cover everything but i will leave it up to him to fill in the gaps. Haroon is currently senior fellow and director of development for the center of global studies, policy, excuse me. He is a commentator and broadcaster who wishes he could be a writer and i think you are, haroon so i actually very much enjoy your writing. Among other things, haroon is also the Muslim Leadership Initiative facilitator at the Shalom Hartman institute. He has appeared in all Major Networks and his reviews have been published at such publications as the washington post, times, cnn, guardian, foreignpolicy and in israel. He is author of a novel, the order of light published by penguin in 2006 and tonight is the launch of his new book , how to be a muslim an american story. Published by beacon press in boston and we thank beacon press for helping us make this event happen. A bit more about haroon. He was previously a fellow at Fordham Law School center of National Security and a fellow in the National Security studies program at new america foundation. He served as director of public operations at the Islamic Center here at nyu from 2007 two 2009. Haroon moghul holds an na from Columbia University where you are currently a phd candidate. So you can tell us more about that. His fields of study include muslim nationalism in south asia, colonial and postcolonial islamic politics and the development of the indian ocean economy. I think that sort of differently than your previous work, this is a very personal book so im going to leave it at that. If i may. Its a real pleasure to welcome Haroon Moghul and we will talk a bit later and have time for questions and answers. Please welcome Haroon Moghul, thanks so much. [applause] hello. Im pretty loud, so i dont know if i need the market mike but you need the mic since you are recording. Cameras follow me everywhere, its called being a muslim. Joke, you can laugh. What i wanted to do is read a section of the book which the color is orange in honor of our president. I saw that coming but i thought it would be a nice gesture. I asked the publisher if we could maybe change the subtitle to a north american story in case i flee to canada but they were not amenable. So the section im going to read is one thats terrifying to me because when you write something, obviously as a writer there are things that you find more i guess suspecting and readers find other parts more affecting so theres the constant search for where is that happy middle ground . This book is personal, it took a lot out of me to write and i come from a very conservative family, religiously speaking. I talked about a lot of things that i dont think my family would have been particularly excited for me to talk about so i had this week long panel panic attack over whether i should invite my family members to my readings because it would be rude not to, but then if i read the book out loud, i would no longer be part of the family. So it was a very exciting balance. What im going to read is a section reasonably early in the book when i was, oh my god, 17 years old. It was before i started nyu, i was in high school and i had come up with a plan, i had a girlfriend and my parents had no idea and i lived in a farm town so there were 95 kids in my entire high school. Everybody in the town except mikes parents knew i was going to prom. This is a section where basically opens with my parents beginning to figure out that i was not the muslim kid they thought i was. When i finally got to the kitchen, a pit in my stomach it was to find my parents waiting an ambush. Why did you have a girl in your car yesterday . My eyes went wide, my mind went into overdrive, on my face compensated by retreating into confusion, perhaps disbelief. A girl . As if i didnt know what one was. Perhaps if i forced them to define the female species, embarrassment would have prevented them from continuing. On reflection this would have worked perfectly. Someone in the community had snitched on me. This is what i got for driving around in the liability of a toy the land cruiser of which there were two in my entire town, one of which along to my family and the other of which belonged to the mosque president whose family was the only other muslim family in town. The two were the same color, beige with brown paneling. The president and my wife both had scars, you can imagine the neighbors confusion. They look the same to me, so to their cars. I decided to only part way. She needed a ride home and sense offering a girl a ride home is already a trespass, maybe that alone was the reason for the momentary panic in my eyes. I folded a waffle in half and shoved it into my mouth, washing it down with chocolate milk. It was nothing, i said, but ive been sloppy. I would have to pursue my secret life with greater deception. I found another job, one that would be easier to hide, softening the blow of being rejected by a chain restaurant. It might have been unethical and possibly illegal. I help students write their thesis papers from scratch for our rewrite. I did not graduate high school once but several times. I profited from my Book Business in order to profit from a life i tried desperately to escape from it. I walked past carla every morning because it was closest to the senior parking lot. My friends tease me for not making out with her. I do wondered why i held back even as i knew, i was scared. It was an absence of opportunity. Her friend samantha prevented 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 samanthas house had to be inside the mosque president s which meant you might see my car which as noted was also his car. A huge risk to take two weeks before prom but this new love hardened the edge, not enough to drive over it. I asked jacob to be my ride. Jacob was a bright kid who sometime develop the senior habit of falling asleep during everything. He was bright enough to coast on his wits but the warning signs were there, judging by his snoozing he deemed most of his life to them unimportant to be present for. He almost always wore oversize hen sweaters meaning he looked like his mother had gotten lost inside himself. In case youve forgotten, jacob was usually asleep, not least when driving. Jacobs mom took a liking to me, shewasnt particularly religious always asked me to find jacob a nice jewish girl. As if i had some special access to jewish women that she lacked. On the weight of the party naturally jacobs nose started bleeding. So badly that we drove right past sams house and almost to massachusetts in the belief that we the closer we got to canada, the further we were from harm. Jacob practically ran his moms Station Wagon ground in a neighbors lawn and did a face plant as he sprinted toward the biggest tree in the lawn. It took me a moment to realize he was repurposing leaves as napkins. We met the homeowner which had real napkins after we explained why a plurality of our towns semis were washing their face with oak leaves. This unfathomable omen aside, i ended up that night exactly where i wanted to be, on samanthas pool deck with carla, her beautiful legs pushing on mine. Might need displaced me. Blind shoulder learn how to walk, is a deep instinct birdwell inside them. Its in the right time and place comes to the surface. Some sports reached entirely around my insecure, cowardly impediment of a self and shoved it to the floor. I had never felt so over, but heres the thing, i could sense with some radar i did not know i had that she wanted the same. The energy hung in the air, we were opposite ends of a magnet. Fusion releases more energy than fishing. I just reach over, put my arms around her and watch her moms Station Wagon pull off. With people and immediate force, we jump away from each other. I walked carla to her car dejected with this meager consolation, as she made her way he offered me her hand in apology. It was so much in the grass that i fear i have spent my entire life trying only to return to that squeeze and where i could be held with someone instead of just myself. I let my parents to believe that on the friday night, the first week of june, convenient, id sleep over at a friends house, this friends mom conspired with me as did everyone else to leave school early on the day of prom, one had to have parental permission. Both parents gave theirs, mind you do not need to ask. The principal winked at my departing a little earlier than the conclusion of the day. I crossed state lines to my friends home, showered and shaved and returned to summers in time for the evenings events. Jacobs neighbors were on vacation so i parked my land cruiser not nearly in their backyard under their deck. Having been caught once before i would not make the same mistake. At jacobs house i finally relaxed, i was going to get away with this. We went to his backyard and pose for the camera. Back then you had to wait for pictures to develop and got to live in the moment instead of watching yourself living in it a few seconds later. Jacob jeremy and i would our days were dressed to the nines and the smiles we wore for the camera belied what was around the corner. For reasons that will become obvious i have no other pictures of me with carla. At prom practically every student went out of his way to gradually congratulate me. More encouraged that i wanted to attend in the first place. Everyones belief system appreciates validation and i wanted there may be so that one day i wouldnt need it. Maybe soon. Ive gotten rejection letters but also admission letters. Between Boston University and nyu i think the latter. All good things must come to an end. I never see many of my classmates again, i never see this me again. It would be like it never happened. And i love dance to Sarah Mclachlan which i cannot listen to even now without breaking out in goosebumps. I still ask myself who she is, why she needs to know we havent done anything wrong and why i was receiving an islamic mean here of all places. And satan asked adam chow i lead you to a tree into a kingdom that never dies. The apple tastes better than it digests but islam has no original sin. Adam is tempted by the desire to live forever yet fails and he falls, but only in falling does he become the caliph he was meant to be so maybe we missed the point of the story all along. You can do the wrong thing for the right reasons. Adam and eve ate from the tree but they repented, they were forgiven, they stuck together. I was a 17yearold who wanted to belong, to believe there was a world he could be inside and a part of, that he didnt need to analyze from without, the judge, excommunicate or be excommunicated from. If only for a night, let the stars circled me. The flared jeans, metal necklaces, the occasional bracelet bracelet, a wallet to a belt loop, these were the tribal marks of an amateur snowboarder and to validate me by announcing i was other than me, seeking out to fit in. Those emblems couldnt tell you how badly i wanted this cheerleader. We can walk what others want because they want it and still want it for ourselves. Sometimes we are unable to point to where our desires begin and others end. After price from we might have stopped at friendlys, i cant remember. Carla wanted nothing to do with me. The last thing she did was chide me, you cant drink, youve got to drive. The next afternoon alone in an empty bedroom, chart carla chose aol instant messenger to shock and all me. We should break up. Sure, i agreed, died. Ive not expected this would end even as i made plans to go away for college. You can hold two can contradictory host in your head and still be devastated when one of them gives way. Its wanting to have your cake and eat it too but what else would you do with cake i drove with my parents to new york the night after prom to see my family. I sat broken and unspeaking in the black backseat. My mom would pass away less than a decade later. My father is still with us another decade after that but i could not admit to them then or ever after that my end run around them and fail because i was in the end, then you carla and i never moved beyond that first kiss, i didnt work catholics more than the catholic girl. She told me in casual detail what intimacies she would and would not be okay with. I nodded determinedly as if this was a subject i had long ago mastered. Yet for me raised on the idea of marriage once and forever, i believe dating was no different from marrying. Once together, we would remain together, terminology was technicality so i was ruined like i could not believe. Its one thing not to go to prom and another to be dumped the day after you pull off the greatest deception in your brief history. If every person has one great test, mine was and may still be departing. I learned i can deal with death but i could not accept that god would let lives get entangled only to be yanked apart. How can you live forever and be a part forever . That death, a real end without resurrection. A place where a swan cant go doesnt help. Had carla not broken up with me, i have broken it off with her. The deeper sorrow carved into you, the more joy you can contain from which i learned this lesson. The further you let a person into your soul, the longer it takes her to leave. I couldnt have guessed then how much it would hurt give anyone anything of my heart but i have stupidly given all of mine, presuming the future existed while the present was coming together. The following spring i stopped by carlas house to pick up bradley, a good friend of mine. Though he lived on the other side of town. Jeremy, was standing beside me area and none of this memory makes any sense but thats probably because all i was focused on and all i could see so many years later is carla at the top of the stairs putting dishes away. She might have waived. A year later we ended up across from each other at a diner to shareware life had taken us. Jeremy laughed as he and i walked back to my car. That, he said , was the longest conversation you ever had with her. Maybe i should ask her out. I never spoke or saw her again. Maybe we do not live one life but many. Im some never intersect. Maybe i tell myself this to keep feelings away because if i know they can unfold somewhere else, they do not need to know what they mean to this universe. My religion says a man should not be alone with a woman but somebody told me a man should not feel so alone that needs to be alone with a woman to feel like his life is worth living. Smiles, lightness and kindness, she provided to our universe otherwise felt misplaced by but what i missed most of all in the months after we broke up was her hand. From the first time she offered hers at a rollerskating break to when we left the dance floor. It maybe god says you hate the thing and it is good for you. Beyond my desire was an awesome loneliness, a feeling of living in a nothing place only briefly interrupted. Life for us to love was no life at all. From time to time this emptiness made the world start and a beautiful but most of all it hunted and pursued me. Something always comes from nothing. With every difficulty, he says, theres relief. It could be this is me or all of us. We stumble onto god in the blank places we live in but dont belong to if only to be taught we dont belong here. Thank you. [applause] that is a chapter from the book and yes, i got dumped the day after prom. Im not bitter at all. Iq haroon. If i may start the q and a part of the evening, i want to refer to an article that was published two days ago in the atlantic by emma green and the article is titled trying to be an apolitical muslim in america. Its from haroons how to be a muslim tries out the new genre, writing about islam thats not about terror or war. How do you feel about that title . And tell us a little bit what brought you to write a very different kind of book . In the spirit of being political, to answer your question about being apolitical, im going to answer a different question because thats what politicians do. Donald trump just start tweeting but i cant do what he does. So the book is titled how to be a muslim and the first review it got was ready positive but the end reviewer was like, he never answers the question of how to be a muslim. He missed the point but even better is theres a book that was published in malaysia called how to be muslim which is a guidebook so there are confused people out there who are getting like why is the book like a series of teaches about how to pray and there would be someone in malaysia who thinks theyre giving their book kids some book on prayer and their going to read about the kiss after prom so its going to be exciting i hope you you know, when i came to nyu in 1998, the bookstore was not here. When i came to nyu, i had a very tenuous connection with my Muslim Identity and i grew up in a very small, very christian town which is a lovely town, it was just small and i came to new york and you have to like whittle new york down to size, its huge that its overwhelming. I basically debated between joining the validation club or the muslim club and the Salvation Club i went to the first event and it was a dance party and i could not dance so i was like, im not going to spend four years not dancing because thats. Thats why i joined the Islamic Center because i cant dance so i might as well join muslims. Terrible life choices. That comes from honest admissions of our own failures for certain things. So i may have answered your question, i promise. I promise im answering your question. I got really excited because all these different times people were muslim and i thought i may not be particularly religious but i can help build a religious community so me and a few kids were like, we can make ic nyu which is a massive institution into Some