In other words, it’s exhausting.

During this period, I was also enrolled in celebrated author Ishmael Reed’s short-story class. A few weeks after the terror attacks, Ishmael pulled me aside and told me I had to write 20 pages of a play for him to pass the class. As an African American, he understood that Muslim Americans were going to get a “hazing,” in his words, but one of the positive ways of fighting back was through storytelling and culture—that’s how “his people” and other minorities did it before us.

It’s true. The current story of Islamophobia in America is simply a remake. In the past, the antagonists have been (and occasionally still are) Jews, Catholics, LGBT persons, Japanese Americans and African Americans. This time, Muslims got the part without auditioning.

Minorities in America have often been either marginalized or completely excised from the American narrative because their stories were told to them by others. At best, they emerge as endearing and ass-kicking sidekicks: the Sulus, Hajji Babas, and Tontos. So it seemed like the only way to truly emerge as the protagonist was to pick up the pen and bum rush the show, in the immortal words of Public Enemy.

Ishmael was sincerely curious about the Muslim-American experience. He said he’d never really heard or seen our stories on the page or the big screen. He encouraged me to write a classic family drama, but with a Pakistani-American family as its protagonists. Considering that I’d never written a play before and this was, after all, a short-story writing class, I begged him to reconsider. He replied that I owed him 20 pages by the end of the semester or he’d fail me. With that encouraging, loving nudge, my first play, The Domestic Crusaders, was born. I started it on my 21st birthday and finished on my 23rd. It’s about a day in the life of six Muslim-American characters from three different generations who reconvene at the family house to celebrate the youngest son’s birthday. In 2004, the play premiered at a Bay Area South-Asian restaurant, Mehran. The next summer it was performed in a showcase at the Berkeley Repertory Theater and San Jose State University.

Four years later, I was trying to raise funds and generate publicity for the play’s premiere in New York at the Nuyorican’s Poets Cafe on September 11, 2009. But being a Bay-Area resident and the son of South Asians, I was initially mocked by most members of my community for not having embraced the holy trinity of occupations:

Doctor Engineer Dubious businessman who somehow makes a lot of money

Also, being a resident of the Bay Area—populated primarily by dot coms, venture capitalists, and entrepreneur wannabes—there’s often a dearth of artistic and creative support unless your business card is adorned with the words “Google” or “Facebook.”