America Was Based On A Poetic Vision.

A Novel Is Not An Allegory.... It Is The Sensual Experience Of Another World. If You Don't Enter That World, Hold Your Breath With The Characters And Become Involved In Their Destiny, You Won't Be Able To Empathize, And Empathy Is At The Heart Of The Novel. This Is How You Read A Novel: You Inhale The Experience. So Start Breathing.

I Believe That It Is Only Through Empathy, That The Pain Experienced By An Algerian Woman, A North Korean Dissident, A Rwandan Child Or An Iraqi Prisoner, Becomes Real To Me And Not Just Passing News. And It Is At Times Like This When I Ask Myself, Am I Prepared - Like Huck Finn - To Give Up Sunday School Heaven For The Kind Of Hell That Huck Chose?

Memories Have Ways Of Becoming Independent Of The Reality They Evoke. They Can Soften Us Against Those We Were Deeply Hurt By Or They Can Make Us Resent Those We Once Accepted And Loved Unconditionally.

Look At Ayatollah Khomeini's Revolution And The Slogans That They Used: Anti-imperialism; Anti-colonialism; The Struggle Of The Have-nots Against The Haves; The State Monopoly Over Economy, Which Was Very Much Patterned After The Soviet Union. All Of These Things Did Not Come Out Of Islam. Islam Is Not That Developed.

Those In The West Who Dismiss The Repressiveness Of Laws Against Women In Countries Like Iran, No Matter How Benign Their Intentions, Present A Condescending View Not Just Of The Religion But Also Of Women Living In Muslim Majority Countries, As If The Desire For Choice And Happiness Is The Monopoly Of Women In The West.