JMF: That's good. That's really good. Has there been any reaction from the Arab world? I'm thinking specifically of what happened to Rushdie after The Satanic Verses.
AD: Not yet. It's still only a week and a half old. Who knows? I had some concerns when I was writing deeply from the point of view of an extremist Muslim terrorist that, you know, these are people you don't want to tick off. But, I'll tell you what, I don't think we can live our lives in fear.

We've got to do what we've got to do. I also believe that I actually tried really hard to write it very respectfully of all views, even that twisted interpretation of Islam. I was trying to be completely - What's the word? - Not respectful. I was trying to honor - not honor. Another bad word. I was trying to capture as honestly and truly as I could this interpretation so I don't know how it would tick off any, I don't think it would tick off any extremist Muslim. I don't care if it does. But, the ones I was really worried about offending are moderate Muslims, which is the vast majority of Muslims who use Islam to be more loving people the way Christians and Jews use their religions. So I was gratified. There is a scene in the story, as you know, where Bassam sits with his father in Saudi Arabia and in that line of dialogue the father really becomes the representative of the moderate voice of Islam so I was gratified to see that. So, I don't know. If I offend anyone, people I expect to offend most are Americans.

I don't intend to but some are going to accuse me of sympathy when it's empathy.

JMF: In an essay for Powells.com, Terry McDermott (Perfect Soldiers) wrote that "there must be many more men just like them…I think they're waiting. I think this is the world we will live in for a long time to come." Given that statement, is there any hope for rapprochement?
AD: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I actually disagree with him. I read his book and I learned a few things. I respectfully disagree. I think, first off, Al-Qaeda was on its last legs after 9/11 because Bin Laden and Zawahiri completely alienated their radical brothers by attacking the far enemy because the rest of their radical extremists, which is a very small amount of people by the way, knew that we would come down hard on them and make it hard for them to fulfill their real goal, which is to overthrow the near enemy, what they consider apostate regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and elsewhere and install sharia or Islamic law. They were on their last gasp with just a handful of men in the mountains and when we invaded Iraq, it fulfilled their paranoid Zionist, crusader alliance thinking and now there are many, many more willing young men to take on, what is for these this handful of people, the highest title you can have, which is shahe, or martyr. But the reason I think it is not as bleak as all this is already just in the last month (June 08) there has been quite a bit of intelligence showing that Al-Qaeda is - not Al-Qaeda but the radical extremist fringe, are really rethinking violence as a way to achieve their goals because they're seeing this as having a huge counter effect, and it is actually not helping them at all. So there is actually a real turn around going on. I think we have to be very careful right now, tread very carefully. I think that one of the first steps is to admit to ourselves that these are other human beings in the world and start looking at them in a more total way.

JMF: Let's turn away from this book for a minute. What sparked your interest in writing?
AD: A girl. It's true. I'd graduated from UT-Austin with a degree in sociology and political science. I was heading for a Ph.D. in the same. I took a year off. I was up in Massachusetts working construction and reading social theory at night. I met a girl who was in a fiction writing class and I began to read the fiction. I got inspired. I sat down and wrote a scene that turned into a short story. It wasn't a very good short story, but it was very sincere. Flaubert said "A bad book comes as sincerely from a man's soul as a good one." (Hearty laughter) And, you know what, I was 22 years old and for the first time in my life, I felt like me, and I didn't know I had me feeling like me. I felt more like Andre than I ever had before. I still didn't know what I was going to do with my life, but I knew that whatever I did that I had to continue doing this writing thing.

JMF: Did the light of your father's success help or hinder you?
AD: It felt in my early years of writing and publishing as if it were a hindrance. It's funny. I got some nasty letters from editors. I can understand it. You know, if one of my favorite writers is Ernest Hemingway - well, who the hell is Ernest Hemingway, Junior? Go do something of your own. It didn't help me publish. I'll tell you my first collection I had three acceptances in magazines out of the seven stories in that book and 117 rejections over six years. My first book went to over 25 publishers; my second book went to 30 publishers. House of Sand and Fog, which ultimately put me on the literary map, went to close to 30 publishers. So, if it gave me any help, I sure as hell didn't see it, and nor would I have wanted it to. The beautiful thing about being his son, except for the name confusion which is still distracting, is: You know I used to work with older students in the graduate programs, and I'd see these men and women who'd wanted to write all their lives and never did because their parents didn't want them to because their parents, understandably, wanted them to be able to eat and pay their rent. Now their parents are gone and these people are in the latter part of their lives and they are just starting to write. Well, when I was a little kid, before my parents divorced when I was about ten, I got to see a grown man go into a room, shut the door, and try to create something. Without knowing it, it became a very influential image in my head. When I was in my 20s and interested in writing, I looked at it as valid a career path as law or medicine, which was a great gift given me that I wasn't aware of until I was older.