Power Q & A with Aamir Hussain

Q: In your novel, Under the Full and Crescent Moon (Dundurn Press, September 23, 2025) you have a very high concept of a Muslim Matriarchy. How important is that to the story?

A: The core inspiration of the story does come from my lived experience of coming from a family of Muslim women who are incredibly accomplished in many different fields and my attempt to reconcile this with the image of my faith in the West of being incredibly misogynistic and oppressive towards women. An image that has been a part of Western culture for hundreds of years but came into prominence as a part of the incessant drumbeats successfully justifying wars against Muslim Majority countries for the past few decades.

Much of the reading and research into Islam and the mechanics of Islamic Law (Sharia) I did was to delve into what it is about Islam that can allow both of these very different realities to exist simultaneously, especially since I did grow up in Saudi Arabia in the 1980's and early 90's which did hew very close to Western misogynistic stereotypes of Islamic society. I've always been very comfortable with the idea that there exist very different interpretations of Islam and as my conviction grew that the faith itself is able to accommodate even something as unintuitive as a matriarchy, the seeds of the story were firmly planted

But having done the research and having used it to create the setting and the core conflicts that drive the story, it is the characters that I have grown to view as the most important. Their triumphs, their failures, their strengths and flaws are what I have been most honoured to have attempted to capture. More than even the accuracy of the theology and history that I built the world on, I am worried about how believable the women are that I strived to portray in the pages of the novel. I want the growth of Khadija, the main character, from a fearful introvert to a fierce defender of her society to be relatable. I want her mentors, her rivals, her friends all to feel real. 

I have been blessed to have had early readers, first among my circle of family and friends and, later, in a wider community of accomplished and talented editors and authors, and every bit of praise from the women among them has been an unimaginable source of relief. 

Under the Full and Crescent Moon by Aamir Hussain (Dundurn Press, 2025)

About Under the Full and Crescent Moon:

In a battle of words and beliefs, a young woman must defend her city against zealotry during the Islamic Golden Age.

After his long-time scribe retires, Khadija’s father, the city’s leading jurist, offers his introverted daughter the opportunity to take on the role of his assistant. In accepting, Khadija is thrust into her community, the medieval hilltop city of Medina’tul-Agham, where she, as a motherless young woman, has spent little time. Led by Imam Fatima and guided by the Circle of Mothers, it is a matriarchy — the only one in the empire. Though forced to set aside her quiet life among the books and parchments of her family home, Khadija thrives, finding her power and place in the world with the support of her new friends and strong female mentors.

Yet Khadija’s idyllic new life is shattered when fanatical forces weaponize Sharia law to threaten the very fabric of the society. Using only the power of her parchment and quill, Khadija must win the support of the people and write fatwas to fight against injustice, or the peace and prosperity of her city will be nothing more than a footnote in the annals of history.

Aamir Hussain

About Aamir Hussain:

Aamir Hussain was born into a family of strong women in Pakistan, grew up in Saudi Arabia, and moved to Canada when he was fifteen years old. He works in the tech sector in Toronto. Under the Full and Crescent Moon is his debut novel. He lives in Milton, Ontario.

Power Q & A with Saad Omar Khan

Saad Omar Khan’s gorgeous novel, Drinking the Ocean (Wolsak & Wynn, May 6, 2025) is a tender and absorbing story of love, family, and the complexities facing Muslims in the West. It has been named one of the 49th Shelf’s most anticipated fiction books of the year and is also one of the most anticipated books within our community.

Moving between Lahore, London, and Toronto, Drinking the Ocean is a story of connections lost and found and of the many kinds of love that shape a life, whether familial, romantic or spiritual.

We are delighted to welcome Saad to our Power Q & A to answer a quick question about his book.

Drinking the Ocean by Saad Omar Khan

Q: Would you describe for readers how your book challenges Western perceptions of Muslim life?

A: One of the biggest challenges when representing the lives of Muslims living in the West is being forced to see Muslims only through the lens of geopolitics or the pathologies that non-Muslims assume is typical of Muslim communities. 

Drinking the Ocean was, in a way, my rejoinder to this framework. In the course of writing this novel, it was often suggested to me that adding in a storyline on terrorism would make the book more marketable. This was well-intentioned advice, given in the context of a post 9/11 world where what is extreme and bloodthirsty had more appeal than a relatively quieter story where the inner lives of Muslim characters takes the centre stage.

Drinking the Ocean was never intended to be a specifically “political” book. It is an unfortunate reality, however, that Muslim identities have become inherently politicized. For years, we were a community seen as problematic, a source of chaos, a potential “fifth column” in the War on Terror, the antithesis of everything the secular, liberal, democratic, progressive West sees itself as. 

Even in our current climate, where non-Muslims recognize the presence of Muslims in society more, and where Islamophobia as a form of bigotry is increasingly acknowledged, it still comes across to me that there is little room for representing the interaction of Muslims with their religious background in ways that are not simplistic, or where the Muslim character, in some fit of self-liberation, divorces themselves from the oppressiveness of Islam in favour of the warm, permissive embrace of a Western, non-religious value system. 

I was, frankly, completely uninterested in this narrative template. Western literature has a long, rich tradition of characters from the Judeo-Christian tradition having to reconcile their sacred, spiritual identity and the realities of their profane, emotional existence. Their are many examples of this, but one  that resonated strongly with me while I was writing Drinking the Ocean was Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. In it, an atheist character has a passionate extramarital affair with a Catholic woman, who abandons the affair as part of a promise to God that she would leave her lover if it would spare his life during a V-2 rocket attack during the Second World War. At no point did Greene, a Catholic himself, condescend to the religious worldview of any of the characters. At the same time, Greene never hesitated to show his characters, believers or otherwise, as what they were: flawed, complex, nuanced, and all too human in the messiest sense of what being human means.

I use this example to illustrate one objective I had in writing this book. As I stated above, this book wasn’t intented to be specifically political, yet it has a political tone just underneath the surface that comes out subtly, and perhaps unintentionally, on my part. Writing about my characters and their emotional challenges--grief, mental illness, familial strife, and difficulties finding spiritual and worldly love--is a political act. It is my fight against the conventional framing of Muslims solely in terms of geopolitics or conflict. The challenge I hope to pose to the reader is to experience this inner world as the characters would. The only explosions to be witnessed are those that exist solely within the human heart. The ruptures my characters face are no less dramatic for it, and certainly no less compelling, as they speak to all of our desires, our need for connection, and our hope in experiencing life at its most transcendent. 

More about Drinking the Ocean:

The day after his thirty-third birthday, Murad spots a familiar face at a crowded intersection in downtown Toronto. Shocked, he stands silently as Sofi, a woman he’d fallen in love with almost a decade ago, walks by holding the hand of a small child. Murad turns and descends the subway steps to return home to his wife as the past washes over him and he is taken back to the first time they met. 

As Murad’s and Sofi’s lives touch and separate, we see them encounter challenges with relationships, family and God, and struggle with the complexities facing Muslims in the West. With compassion and elegance, Saad Omar Khan delicately illuminates the arcs of these two haunted lives, moved by fate and by love, as they absorb the impact of their personal spiritual journeys.

Saad Omar Khan

ABOUT THE SAAD OMAR KHAN:

Saad Omar Khan was born in the United Arab Emirates to Pakistani parents and lived in the Philippines, Hong Kong and South Korea before immigrating to Canada. He is a graduate of the University of Toronto and the London School of Economics and has completed a certificate in Creative Writing from the School of Continuing Studies (University of Toronto) where he was a finalist for the Random House Creative Writing Award (2010 and 2011) and for the Marina Nemat Award (2012). In 2019, he was longlisted for the Guernica Prize for Literary Fiction. His short fiction has appeared in Best Canadian Stories 2025 and other publications.