About
Writer, Skeptic. At Work.
I. Present
I write essays on contested moral and political questions — belief formation, identity and gender, and the strains of cultural pluralism.
My lens is that of a skeptic: I think about the ways in which what is unseen (social behavior, habits of mind, norms and inherited beliefs) create and sustain society, and what this means about the limits of reason.
I am at work on a book. Most of my current writing appears in my newsletter.
II. Biography
A. What others find important about me
- I was born in Pakistan, but raised in America, in a Muslim family.
- I had become an atheist by the age of 16.
- In my early 20s, I began participating in secular activism. I founded several nonprofit groups, most notably Ex-Muslims of North America.
- For over a decade after, I poured my heart into this world — building support communities, advocating for the repeal of blasphemy and apostasy laws, and generally attempting to revive the lost culture of freedom of expression.
- In my early 30s, I left activism to focus on writing and speaking.
B. What I find important about myself
- I am a structural thinker. What I find compelling are the explanatory bones — the patterns, relationships, and structures of an argument. I have no patience for tours of phenomena presented as analysis, or for narratives that enlist the drama of a story as a substitute for an argument. I am building tools to think.
- I write to understand. I began with questions on how beliefs form and why they persist, as I was hoping to find tools to help persuade others towards more rational lines of thought. My experience in activism frustrated my theories, and so I began to build a different model of how minds actually work. Most of what I write now is downstream of this revision.
- I am a mother. Motherhood takes the title as the most psychologically (and eventually, intellectually) disruptive event in my life — a catastrophe and dissolution and an enlargement all at once.