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​Why did you write this book? What was your original inspiration?
 
It’s somewhat of a winding story, but I think it may be instructive for current or prospective grad students. When I first went to graduate school in 2007, I wanted to research Islam in America and, following the advice of my advisors, I sought out a research topic that very few scholars had already looked at. After about six months pursuing a topic that didn’t appeal to me very much, I decided to switch to American conversion to Islam after 9/11, which at the time had received almost no academic attention. I did a small-scale, local study on the topic for my MA thesis, but when I attempted to do a large-scale, national study for my PhD dissertation, I was not able to cultivate a good network of potential respondents. As a result, after having contacted over 600 Muslim organizations, I was only able to obtain fifteen total interviews and/or surveys—just two more than I had obtained in the small-scale study. I felt this wasn’t enough data for a dissertation, so I decided to turn my attention to a related topic that had similarly received very little attention from scholars: the history of white and Latino converts to Islam in the US.
 
Since so little had been written about white and Latino Muslims, I had to begin my research by collecting any references I could find in the existing literature on Muslims in America. It turned out that the most enticing leads were in books written about African American Muslims. After collecting all the published material I could, I decided that the best way to find more information was to dig deeper into the history of African American Islam with the hope that I’d be able to trace the known leads further and possibly make some new discoveries. What I soon learned, though, was that much of what I was finding concerning African American Islamic history—most of which had nothing to do with white and Latino converts—had not been discussed in great detail in the literature, and that these findings were going to require their own analyses. Since at that time I was also reading several classic multivolume studies and series of thematically-similar books—most notably Hodgson’s Venture of Islam, Gay’s The Enlightenment, Foucault’s work, and Deleuze and Guattari’s books—I felt inspired to bring all my research together as its own multivolume study. After finding an enthusiastic publisher, I’ve been able to bring this vision to fruition, and the present book is the second out of three planned volumes in the series that I’ve named A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States.

​What inspired you to begin this project, and how did this inspiration transform or continue during your project?
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This book was a product of a major transformation of my dissertation submitted to the Department of History at the University of Hawai`i at Manoa. The dissertation sought to trace the transmission of Islamic knowledge in Sulawesi, Indonesia and Kelantan, Malaysia during the first half of the twentieth century. Included in my analysis of the transmission of knowledge were the objectives, methods, and impacts of this knowledge. As I let the colonial and local sources speak for themselves, I found an interesting characteristic. Many authors, activists, and teachers, conceived of themselves and their desires and programs in terms of being up-to-date and present in their socio-political environment while being connected to the past and to the authoritative scriptures. The characteristic I found was what can be conceptually labelled as "becoming modern", hence the subtitle. While my dissertation has only one chapter on colonial desires and projects, I expanded it into chapters focusing on each domain that the colonized had: organization, politics, law, and education. I also expanded the dissertation’s regional focus on Sulawesi and Kelantan to parts of Malaya and Indonesia. In the book as the outcome, I compared and contrasted the colonial powers, Dutch and British, to the local, Malay and Indonesian, methods for becoming modern in the domains of organization, politics, law, and education.
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​Why did you write this book?
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After converting to Islam during my MA studies in Political Science at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York around 2006, I decided that I wanted to move my research from Critical Theory more towards topics related to Islam.  When considering how absolutely messed up so many Muslim majority countries at the time were and then looking at the ideas of earlier scholars like Al-Mawardi, Nizam al-Mulk, Al-Farabi, Ibn Rushd, and Ibn Khaldun on politics, leadership, and administration, I realized that the Islamic tradition was full of brilliant figures who took these topics very seriously in the past. 

After looking more closely over later writings on political Islam, I felt that something was missing—there was a disconnect between much of the 20th century Islamic political thought I read and contemporary governing realities in a practical sense.  I did not get a sense that most of these people actually read people like Max Weber or Herbert Simon.  If one looks at many of the works of well-known writers on political Islam in the 20th century, say people like Sayyid Qutb, Hasan al-Banna, or Alija Izetbegovic, one gets a heavy dose of what is wrong with the Muslim world, how the West has damaged the Muslim world, and why Islamic governance is so essential.  This was important for its time, but moving beyond slogans is essential for Islamic governance to be successful today.  One contemporary thinker on this topic today I respect very much today is Rachid al-Ghannouchi.  I wanted to do something in his vein, except I wanted to really engage with the mainstream literature and ideas discussed in political science today.  I felt that I possessed enough knowledge on topics related to Islam and political science that I could come up with a dissertation that connected both, and I did. After two and half years of revisions and 35,000 more words (mostly the case study chapters that were not in the original dissertation), I came up with what you see today.

​What inspired you to begin this project, and how did this inspiration transform or continue during your project? 
I have long had an interest in the history of minorities.  Family and scholarly reasons led me to the study of the Turkic world and, in particular, Muslim minorities in Russia. While I was still a graduate student at the Sorbonne and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, I had the privilege to study with Helene Carrere d’Encausse, Chantal Lemercier-Quelquejay, and Alexander Benningsen, internationally renowned specialists of Islam in the USSR.  Thanks to them, I chose to work on the Turkic-speaking Tatars of the middle Volga, descendants of the Turkic Bolghars and the Golden Horde. Under Russian rule since the sixteenth century, they have had the longest history of resistance to assimilation and co-existence with an alien culture among the Muslim peoples of the Soviet Union. 

Benningsen encouraged me to examine their history, which had been unjustly marginalized by the scholarly communities of Russian and Islamic studies.  Learning of my interest in cultural and religious history, he suggested that I work on the jadids, the modernist Tatar intellectuals of the end of the nineteenth century, who, in his words, established a Muslim educational system for men and women which had no parallel in India, Egypt, or Algeria until after their decolonization. But while I was looking at the Tatar modernists’ school programs and newspapers, I accidentally found the diaries of several Russian missionaries who lived in Christian and Islamic Tatar villages before the rise of the jadid movement.  These missionaries were greatly concerned about the spread of Islamic literacy among the Christian Tatars, whose ancestors had been baptized in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and the non-Tatar Christian and animist peoples of the middle Volga of Turkic and Finno-Ugric origin (Chuvash, Maris, Udmurts, and Mordvins).  Even Russians sent their children to Tatar madrasas if there were no church schools in their vicinity.

The missionaries’ observations, although biased, led me to look at earlier religiously conceived forms of literacy and identity markers.  Modernist Tatars and Russian missionaries often ridiculed popular religious literature (including tales of the prophets, eschatological tracts, and Sufi poetry) for its magical components. Likewise, Western historians, including my own mentors, largely ignored these “vulgar” works.  Most scholars in the Eurasian and Central Asian field (except for a few--Devin DeWeese, Allen Frank, Ron Sela, Paolo Sartori, and Michael Kemper) emphasized jadidism.  Relying primarily on printed Tatar jadid newspapers and writings, Russian archival police reports, and memoirs of jadid activists, most historians depict the jadids as progressive heroes fighting against ignorant, obscurantist ulama who failed to adapt to Russian rule.  They tend to describe traditional Muslim education as stagnant, strictly theological, and exclusively male.  In fact, traditional Islamic education helped to Islamize animist, Christian Finno-Ugric and Turkic peoples, and even some Russians.  It also empowered women to become vectors of Islamic learning within and outside their village boundaries.  These new converts to Islam established clandestine mosques and schools in officially Christian Orthodox multi-ethnic villages despite Russian laws that forbade apostasy from Christianity or conversion from any religion of the Empire to Islam.

Murat Mohsen and Jeremiah Stilts

Bangladesh is a country of natural beauty. It was a country of greenery and brown earth. But then blood was spilt on its soil - blood of independence, of self-identity - and it turned red. The green now grows out of the red. The flag itself bears witness. A circle of blood-red at the heart, surrounded by lush green. It is the flag that beats in the winds of turmoil, of political strife, of financial disability, of poverty - so much poverty.

• Hasan Azad, Red and Green Oil on Water
  

 
He had never been so anxious for the arrival of a woman he did not want to see.
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• David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

The direction and scope of Hasan Azad’s ambitious, enigmatic, panoramic novel centered on Bangladesh’s independence is signaled from the opening epigraphs. Antonio Gramsci writes that history “has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. Therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.” And Freud tells us that “Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences.” In the story that Azad tells, there is no room for absolutes or easy answers. Bangladesh’s independence is a chaotic affair, where ontological security has become little more than a chimera, where despair, lust, and violence is pervasive, and where one hopelessly seeks “clarity in the face of insanity.” ​

According to many, being Muslim and American, or Muslim and western of any stripe, are contradictions in terms. You have done a lot of work to overcome some of these stereotypes. Clearly, a lot more work needs to be done. What are some practical things people can do? 
 
It’s particularly pronounced for Muslims these days, but the binary is increasingly applied to all kinds of communities—can you be an immigrant and an American, or black and French? My experience and context is American; I can’t speak to other contexts. There are many things that can be done, on a personal and everyday level, scaled up to the national. First and foremost, simple engagement makes a huge difference. A mosque, for example, should be an institution that serves its wider community, that connects with elected officials, interfaith partners, and empowers local residents, in addition to, of course, serving as a spiritual and communal hub.
 
There needs to be greater investment in producing journalists, supporting artists, encouraging storytellers, and developing the capability to resist discriminatory legislation and rhetoric. As these capacities are realized, it’s possible for a community to build more durable partnerships and establish itself more effectively. Last but not least, who is talking to Republicans? There are many Republicans who are deeply dismayed by the rise of Donald Trump and the debasement of their party. They may not have been and may very well still not be amenable to all of one’s politics, but they are part of the American landscape, many of them have been civil servants or elected officials, and all of them matter.
 
For me, I’ve invested in two roles that I believe help make America a better place, and help Muslims too. The first is creative. Hence the book. The second is educational. The more we understand the nuances and complexities of different communities, the less tempted we are to demonize them. We can instead find platforms, social and political, that emphasize our common interests and shared values—that everyone should be treated equally, that government is best when it checks and balances itself, that no person should be held accountable for the actions of another, that there is and must be due process, that the institutions of the state serve the people, and not themselves.

​Why did you write this book?
 
My book stems from frustration with the most common approaches to Islam, tolerance, and democracy. Instead of asking whether Islam is compatible with democracy, my book investigates the more important (and less polemical) question: what kind of democracy do Muslims want? Instead of asking whether Indonesian Muslims are tolerant, my book investigates the historical and political conditions that engender tolerance and intolerance. Most important, to me, is that my book explains what tolerance means to the leaders of the world’s largest Islamic organizations and challenges the assumption that liberal modes of tolerance are necessary for making democracy work. Islam and Democracy in Indonesia: Tolerance without Liberalism demonstrates that Indonesia’s Muslim leaders favor a democracy in which individual rights and group-differentiated rights converge within a system of legal pluralism, a vision at odds with American-style secular government but common in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe.

​What inspired you to begin this project, and how did this inspiration transform or continue during your project?
​I have worked as an educator in the public school system for over nine years. Throughout my experiences I would regularly come across students that had extremely ignorant views about Islam. As such, I was curious to know how young Muslims felt about their high school experiences in Canada. Did they perceive racist treatment in the post-9/11 context, how did they cope with biases, discrimination, etc. I also wanted to give  young Muslims a platform to express their thoughts and views, as many young Muslims, particularly Muslim women have their views authorized for them. What I mean by this is that, everyone tries to speak on behalf of Muslims and Islam. Rarely are Muslims given an opportunity and platform to speak for themselves. 

What inspired you to begin this project, and how did that inspiration transform or continue during the project? 
I had been thinking for a while about a number of issues surrounding the construction of the category of “religion,” more specifically, about how the idea of Islam has been a large part of colonial history, and how historical contingencies affect our reading of Islam today. My first book looks at the construction of the Muslim man in the Western imagination (Muslims in the Western Imagination, Oxford, 2015). In a way, this book is a continuation of this work, in the sense that I am asking questions about why certain ideas or subjects—in the first book, Muslim bodies, in this book, Muslim religious traditions—are presented the way they are, and what the history is behind these representations.
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I have also been interested in theoretical issues in religion for many years, some of which I try to address in this book. This project is an attempt to reformulate the subject of Islamic pilgrimage while addressing some of the challenges surrounding the study of Islam, pilgrimage, and mysticism. Before I undertook the research, I spent considerable time thinking about the ways in which knowledge is constructed, as well as how this knowledge is used politically. It isn’t just a book about Islamic pilgrimage--hajj, umrah, Shi’i traditions, Sufi shrines, cyber-hajj, sacred space, religious souvenirs, and more—it is also about the fundamental questions surrounding the study of Islam (and more broadly, religion). Why do we define Muslims and their traditions in such narrow ways? Who “counts” as a Muslim? What is “Sufism”? Is pilgrimage always a physical journey? How is space constructed? What work does modernity do to religious traditions?