The only way there will be peace with the Muslim world is if there is an Islamic Reformation the way there was the Christian Reformation. The trouble with Islam is that it has never been adapted to the modern age. It has never had that transition or an adaptation. If we still believed in the Bible the way they did before the Reformation we would still be burning witches. If you did everything you were supposed to do in the Torah a disobedient son would be taken into the city square and stoned to death. People will say that jihad doesn’t really mean to go out and fight with guns and bombs to recreate the caliphate. Well, actually it does. It doesn’t matter how much you wish it didn’t. It’s literal. So what you need are spiritual Muslim leaders to come out and say that this applied a thousand years ago, it doesn’t apply anymore, now we are going to interpret jihad as something internal and peaceful. Unfortunately, there have been some Muslim religious leaders who have tried to create that and they quickly got assassinated, because there are forces with interest in keeping these old interpretations relevant.
novelist, writing teacher
Gina B. Nahai (farsi: جینا نهایی, born 1961) is the author of Cry of the Peacock, Moonlight on the Avenue of Faith, Sunday's Silence and Caspian Rain. Her novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages. She was also a lecturer in the Master of Professional Writing (MPW) at the University of Southern California.
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Alternative Names:
Gina Barkhordar Nahai
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(why did you choose close third for the POV? Why not first person?) GN: Because I wanted to have a voice that echoed the voice of an observer that wasn’t entirely objective or fair. The voice in the novel has a lot of overtones or judgment, because as a society this is the voice that is constantly defining all of us to each other. Opinions get repeated. I wanted the narrative to have that kind of community voice.
Every time I do an event, invariably people in there will start asking questions and within minutes, it evolves into people expressing various forms of outrage: at their Iranian neighbor, at their Iranian ex-partner, at their Iranian client. A lot of the things they say about Iranians are true -- some of us are ostentatious, some of us are too clever in business -- but what people don’t realize is that some people in every community are like that. What’s happened with us is we’ve become identified only by our negative traits. We’re all getting blamed for the sins of the few in the community. I think the reason for that is that we are just very visible. We came to America as a big group and from the very start we made our presence known. I think people are reacting to that.
Every time I write a book, I’m trying to figure out the answer to a question. By the time I’ve written the book and gone through different drafts, I’ve figured out the answer. With this book, the question was: Is there going to be a distinct Iranian-Jewish culture and community in the United States in the long run? And do we want to assimilate so much that we become part of the larger American Jewish community? And why have we only managed to integrate ourselves to the extent that we have?