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When I started out, it was around the whole 9/11 - Islamophobia was just sort of hitting a second wind. Obviously that informed a lot of my humor, and it influenced a lot of what I was talking about on stage because it was extremely relevant at the time.

What has bothered and angered radical Muslims is that I'm a non-Muslim writing anything at all about Islam. But this is fiction, and I don't think Islam is above criticism or fictionalization any more so than Judaism, Christianity, Mormonism or Hinduism is.

I think lot of Muslims have gotten fatigued by the way Muslim characters, even 'positive' ones, are portrayed in the media.

If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.

I don't know that Islam has ever been a subject of anything that I've written. I think Muslims have often been, but those are two very different things.

The caricature of Islam as a violent and intolerant religion is horrendously incomplete. Remember that those standing up to Muslim fanatics are mostly Muslims.

Ironically, the first thing that appealed to me about Islam was its pluralism. The fact that the Koran praises all the great prophets of the past.

When I was writing 'The Satanic Verses,' if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn't have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn't seem to be a big deal.

I'm a comedian who happens to be Muslim; my comedy stems on all forms of my identity.

I'm not a scholar of Islamic history or jurisprudence or anything.