Diaspora Dialogue: Aymann Ismail is Redefining the Muslim Memoir

In Becoming Baba, a journalist and author tears up the post-9/11 script for Muslim storytelling.

For decades, Muslim American stories have followed a familiar script: explain, defend, humanize, repeat. In the long shadow of 9/11, Muslim writers have been expected to soothe Islamophobia rather than tell the truth of their lives. Aymann Ismail, a journalist and son of Egyptian immigrants, tears up that script in his debut memoir, Becoming Baba.

His coming-of-age story moves from gender-segregated Islamic school classrooms in New Jersey to getting high and praying with his wife after their second child is born—embracing the contradictions many Muslim writers have been afraid to voice publicly.

In our conversation, Ismail was as candid as his prose, bracing for the criticism he knows is coming both from within his own community and the usual suspects outside of it.

I read your book in a day and a half, which, as a parent, is saying something. What I loved most was how messy it is, how …