Real tolerance means respecting other people even when they baffle you and you have no idea why they think what they think.
G. Willow Wilson
Superheroes don't often get their powers in one fell swoop. It's like superhero puberty.
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.
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.
The script for what would eventually become my first graphic novel, 'Cairo,' sort of came to me in kind of a bolt of lightning within 24 hours of having moved to that city. Just a jumble of characters and narratives and interesting things that I was seeing and experiencing for the first time.
Islam is antiauthoritarian, sex-positive monotheism.
Some languages expand not only your ability to speak to different people but what you're able to think.
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.
When you write for a comic series, many superheroes have 60 or some years of history that you are coming into.
I think all these pop cultural media often reflect conversations we're having in the real world at that moment in time. I think one of the big conversations we're having as a culture is we thought we'd solved sexism and racism, and we're realizing more and more that we haven't.
So many people are of mixed heritage; everyone is from somewhere else.
Sometimes, by using the most over-the-top, ridiculous plot device you can imagine, you get some interesting little conflicts and cool things that you might not otherwise have a chance to explore.
I do hope the success of 'Ms. Marvel' will open doors for other characters and other creators.
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.
When we read fiction, we want to get outside of ourselves and are able to see from a perspective we haven't seen through before. That can be very powerful.
In Arab Islamic society, it is traditionally taboo to criticize the lifestyle or personal philosophy of any practicing Muslim.
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.
I was born in New Jersey and lived there until I was about 10, so Jersey is in my roots.
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.
The great thing about Cairo is the vast majority of women wear some kind of head scarf, but they are also very fashion-conscious. They love bright colors.
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.
Americans look at the Middle East as a source of trauma because of 9/11. At the same time, I could see the fear going on in the Middle East as well - which would be the next country to be invaded or sanctioned? Being around those tensions was traumatic for me.
I didn't believe in spiritual homelands, and found God as readily in a strip mall as in a mosque.
Most people know Muslims in their community but don't realize it.
Ninety percent of the comic books I've written in the past had little or nothing to do with Islam.
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 road to democracy is rarely smooth, but for Egyptian women, it has been exceptionally bumpy.
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.
I think comics are really part of The Zeitgeist. They reflect back to us the issues that we're concerned about in the time they are written.
'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.
The Qur'an is God's property, not mine.
In many countries in the Middle East - and this is changing in the wake of the Arab Spring - but for a long time, censorship of books and film was a very big deal. There were books you couldn't buy; things with political content would be censored, but there were some genres of books and film that the censors just didn't understand.
I don't think there's something inherently irreligious about comics.
I'm writing in English; I'm writing for a Western audience, but the people I'm surrounded by in my daily life are mostly non-white.
The Qur'an is in many ways far less concrete than the Bible, relying on the esoteric more often than the apparent.
My synesthesia is mostly gone - it was a much bigger factor when I was a kid. But having no depth perception is a bonus when you're trying to lay out flat images and describe them to an artist - flat is all I see.
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.
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!
'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.
The 'Islam vs. the West' dialogue ceased to be about real people a long time ago.
'Air' is very placeless - it's set in many different countries, and much of the story is about going places rather than being places. 'Air' is about travelers, and I'm a chronic traveler.
I keep setting the bar higher for myself in terms of what I'm trying to accomplish.
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.
I don't want to compare myself to somebody like Fitzgerald or Hemingway, but I feel like, for some writers, going to a certain city, a certain place, is what kickstarts your imaginative process.
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.
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.
People love to talk about new and different. They don't always love to buy and read new and different.
I think people, especially in the Muslim community, are rightly cautious any time you hear, 'Oh, there's going to be a Muslim character.'
I think any time you have a super team, whether it's all men or all women or both, what you have are people with very unique strengths that aren't always totally compatible.
