G. Willow Wilson
'Habibi' is a complex and unapologetic work of fantasy - no idle undertaking for readers of any faith or no faith at all, but one well worth the trouble.Collection: Faith
I have younger friends who are in this pinch where they feel they've been counted out before they've had a chance to prove themselves. They've inherited a lot of debt - not just student debt but environmental debt, political debt. They really feel squeezed.Collection: Environmental
For most inhabitants of the Arab world, the prevailing cultural attitude toward women - fed and encouraged by Wahhabi doctrine, which is based on Bedouin social norms rather than Islamic jurisprudence - often trumps the rights accorded to women by Islam.Collection: Attitude
'Lost' seems to be the inverse of 'Air': It explores dispossession and identity by forcing a bunch of people into one invented landscape instead of using many invented landscapes to keep people apart.
'Air' is what the world looks like: An inconvenient mashup of human politics and divine geography. We leave bits and pieces of ourselves and our history in every place we encounter.
Leaving your country at a tender age really rearranges the way you perceive the world. So I feel marginally attached to many places rather than deeply attached to any one place.
The 'Islam vs. the West' dialogue ceased to be about real people a long time ago.
I do hope the success of 'Ms. Marvel' will open doors for other characters and other creators.
We don't want to create a literary ghetto in which black writers are only allowed to write black characters and women writers are put on 'girl books.'
There is a certain danger in thinking about diversity in its own little box, as something that is somehow separate from 'normal' comic books and comics creators.
Ninety percent of the comic books I've written in the past had little or nothing to do with Islam.
In 2003, as a 21-year-old convert to Islam, I moved from Colorado to Cairo to see what life was like in a Muslim country.
We think of divinity as something infinitely big, but it is also infinitely small - the condensation of your breath on your palms, the ridges in your fingertips, the warm space between your shoulder and the shoulder next to you.
The transition between life in red-state America and life in the Arab capital was at times overwhelming because of the traditional segregation of men and women in many public and private settings.
For me, insomnia was something ordinary, and it came and went for ordinary reasons.
The Qur'an is in many ways far less concrete than the Bible, relying on the esoteric more often than the apparent.
An ambitious, surreal tale of the love between a young Arab girl sold into marriage and the orphan boy she adopts, 'Habibi' spans multiple eras of conflict and change, stretching the lifetimes of its two protagonists over many centuries.
The Qur'an is God's property, not mine.
Most people know Muslims in their community but don't realize it.
In all likelihood, you've been treated by a Muslim doctor or served by a Muslim waiter or worked beside a Muslim computer programmer. Even if you think, 'I don't know any Muslims,' it's probably not true.
Muslims are ordinary members of the working public, just like you.
I don't think being a writer who is religious means you have to write about nothing but religion. When I do write about religion, it's to inform the story, not to push a certain agenda.
I don't think there's something inherently irreligious about comics.
There are very religious people who write comics and who love comics.
Thematically, in a lot of what I write, there's a sense of displacement, of being rooted in multiple places, and how that can tug at your identities and your wants and your goals.
I didn't believe in spiritual homelands, and found God as readily in a strip mall as in a mosque.
My faith did not require beauty or belonging - the deeper I went into my practice, the less it required at all.
I discovered I was a monotheist... That rules out polytheism. I have also had a problem with authority, which rules out any religion with a priesthood or leader who claims to be God's representative on Earth.
Islam is antiauthoritarian, sex-positive monotheism.
Comic book readers tend to be pretty secular and anti-authoritarian; nothing is above satire in their eyes.
It's very difficult to balance different audiences and talk to each one without selling the others short. There is no universal literature - or, if there is, I don't know how to write it.
My career is a black comedy of sorts. I spent a lot of time explaining myself to various different groups. But more and more, I'm finding that the desire to communicate, which all these audiences share, is a powerful thing.
The story of a passionate woman in a stale marriage is as old as Helen of Troy.
Out-marriage is an issue religious groups have been wrestling with for some time. Of course men and women fall in love. Of course it's not always convenient to their respective cultural and spiritual norms.
Choosing a spouse with religion in mind is not always a mistake, especially if your heritage and your faith are important parts of who you are. The trick is, as always, to recognize a good thing when you see it - and never mistake the bad for something more.
That's something the head scarf, in a symbolic way, is meant to do in Arabic culture: it defines your relationship to your husband and the men of your family differently than your relationship to the average guy on the street you've never met.
Real tolerance means respecting other people even when they baffle you and you have no idea why they think what they think.
The road to democracy is rarely smooth, but for Egyptian women, it has been exceptionally bumpy.
To me, a staircase looks like a series of dark and light horizontal stripes, which is exactly how you'd draw a staircase. So I know how the image is going to look on the page.
In prose, you have a lot more room for digression, for very meaty kinds of dialogues. In graphic novels, you're writing haiku-length dialogue. Your job is to be efficient, to get out of the way of the art.
Despite all the criticisms that have been leveled at the comics community, both in terms of fans and creators, I have always felt more comfortable and accepted in the comics community than I have in any other medium of publishing that I've had the pleasure of working in.
In comics, we're all weird together. I can go to a comics convention and not stand out, even though I'm the only woman in a headscarf there, because the guy next to me has a beard and a Sailor Moon costume.
I write about real life as it is lived by the young American Muslim women that I've had the pleasure of meeting throughout the course of my travels as a writer and being able to speak in different places and meet different people at signings and things.
Being a Muslim in America, I've noticed that there's a ton of crossover between the Muslim community and geekdom.
When I need guidance or just to kvetch or to bounce ideas off of people, I go to Gail Simone, who is very much kind of the den mother of all of us who are working comics.
I was born in New Jersey and lived there until I was about 10, so Jersey is in my roots.
Superheroes don't often get their powers in one fell swoop. It's like superhero puberty.
When you write for a comic series, many superheroes have 60 or some years of history that you are coming into.
As a writer and a mom, I wish I could split into two or three different people so I could be with my kids all day, write all day, and go out and do the interviews all day. Multiplicity woman!
People love to talk about new and different. They don't always love to buy and read new and different.