Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without booms?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Aad Aktar.

He is the author of American Dervish.

It's a first novel.

And people who listen know how rare that is on Bookworm.

But I found it to be a book that told me all sorts of new things.

It's a coming-of-age novel of a new sort.

It's the coming of age of a young Muslim boy. And it taught me more of what a spiritual life would be as directed by the

Koran than I had experienced in any other book.

So in that sense, it's an important book because it tells us what the world is like

for a people we have to some extent refused to get to know and to another extent are just starting to get to know.

Tell me how you came to begin.

I had wanted to write a book that was going to give a Western readership a felt sense of what it was like to be Muslim. I wanted, there's so much

discussion about Islam. We hear the word so often, hear it in the news, you hear it, you know,

you read in the papers. And there's a lot of associations that have been accreted to that word,

...