As Islamic History Month draws to a close, I want to talk about history in general a little bit. My novel that just released "Under the Full and Crescent Moon" is a work of fiction inspired by history and I do have some credentials on the subject.
In Zohran Mamdani's remarkable speech on the 24th of October 2025 the candidate for the mayor of New York city brought to bear the rigour of his academic father to understand and define a pressing problem and the artistry of his filmmaker mother to, in less than 10 minutes, communicate it.1 Which is not only the reality of Islamophobia...
October is Islamic History Month or so I'm told and what better way to celebrate than picking up my novel that's based on Islamic history!
I consider myself to be a Progressive Muslim and that has gotten easier to explain over the years as I can just point to one of the many examples of Muslim identifying politicians in the West that are more than happy to march and mug for the cameras in Pride Parades.
Us Shia people are in the news a lot lately. What with the groups and countries that are directly resisting Israel outside of Palestine being Shia, and Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for Mayor of New York City being Shia as well. And since it's the start of the Islamic Month of Muharram, which is an incredibly important time for us. It's a good time to talk about what that means.
So here we are less than four months away from the launch of my book and I'm five days late in making my monthly post.
It's kind of reflective of where I find myself. It's been a very busy month for me personally but my book marketing has suffered as a result.
So instead of giving an overview of how my month went as I usually do I want to talk about why I think I haven't been focusing on getting the word out about "Under the Full and Crescent Moon".
I attended an inter faith dialogue event a few months ago in my hometown that was setup by a Shia Muslim group on the topic of end times prophecies. It was a well attended and well run panel with a number of religious leaders explaining their own theology's views of the end times. Most of the presenters were incredibly respectful of each other and the topic itself was a pretty neutral one.
So I was pretty flabbergasted when the Muslims on the panel started going after each other with aggressive rhetoric.