ing. We played baseball and had crushes
on girls. There were some cultural is-
sues navigating that, but I never felt
myself to be coming from the outside.
And then there was this very, very differ-
ent world view within the Pakistani
community in Milwaukee, which was
that this society was illegitimate.”
To tell the truth about where he was
from, Akhtar felt that he had to press
on those fault lines. The Milwaukee Pa-
kistanis whom Akhtar depicts in “Amer-
ican Dervish” are hardly model minori-
ties. The plot deals with the lasting effects
of the domestic and legal repression of
women in the Muslim world, and builds
to an ugly eruption of anti-Semitism.
“American Dervish” rapped on a door
that Akhtar had long wanted to open;
“Disgraced” tore its hinges off. The play’s
protagonist, Amir, is a Pakistani-born
American who has jumped through
every hoop. He is married to a beauti-
ful, accomplished white woman, lives in
a luxurious apartment on the Upper
East Side, and is on the partner track
at his corporate-law firm. In the course
of the play’s single, ninety-minute act,
everything is stripped from him. Akhtar
was thinking of “Othello” when he wrote
“Disgraced,” but the play also owes a
debt to the American literature of ra-
cial passing, in which characters who
have managed to escape their origins
fear that some unwelcome revelation
will cast them out of the white world
they have given everything to enter. In
“Disgraced,” though, it is Amir who ex-
poses himself:
ISAAC: Did you feel pride on September
Eleventh?
AMIR (With hesitation): If I’m honest, yes.
EMILY: You don’t really mean that, Amir.
AMIR: I was horrified by it, okay? Abso-
lutely horrified.
JORY: Pride about what? About the towers
coming down? About people getting killed?
AMIR: That we were finally winning.
JORY: We?
AMIR: Yeah... I guess I forgot... which
we I was.
Daniel Kehlmann told me, “What
you want, as a playwright, is to have a
climactic moment that resonates so
much that people might forget every-
thing else that happened in the play but
they will remember that moment. Ayad
achieved that in ‘Disgraced.’ ”
“Disgraced” is rife with such taboo
drama. Amir criticizes the Prophet and
ridicules the idea that the Quran was
dictated by God—grave blasphemies
in Islam. “If you were to do the play in
Cairo or in Islamabad, they would burn
the theatre down,” Akhtar said. Its re-
ception among American Muslims has
hardly been without controversy. Akhtar
summarized the general attitude: “We
were so excited that you won this big
thing and everybody’s talking about
your play and now we’ve come with our
parents and our family and you’re at-
tacking us.” At the climax of the play,
Amir, distraught and enraged, beats his
wife, an act that provocatively mimics
Western stereotypes about Muslim men.
With “the brown dude reinforcing and
enacting the worst version of his cul-
ture,” one Pakistani-American critic
wrote, “the brown people in the audi-
ence are—once again, for their sanity
and safety—on the defense, forced to
be educators.”
Akhtar finds that he himself is fre-
quently on the defensive. When “Dis-
graced” was on Broadway, he attended
a fund-raiser at the home of a wealthy
patron of the arts. The only other non-
white person in the room was a youngMuslim caterer. “I read your play,” she
told him, as she was clearing his table.
“So you’re the kind of person who makes
us look bad.”
“Then that’s juxtaposed against folks
who will come up to me and say, ‘I un-
derstand what you’re doing, but why
are you doing it in front of them?’”
Akhtar said. “It echoes all the same
stuff that Philip Roth went through.”
Akhtar considers his path to have been
blazed by Jewish-American writers like
Roth and Saul Bellow, who, in the face
of parochial censure, made audacious
art that refused to flatter their commu-
nities. As unhappy as certain Jews were
with “Portnoy’s Complaint,” though,
none of them had the power to issue a
fatwa. (“The Satanic Verses” has been
a touchstone for Akhtar since he read
it in his teens.) Still, Akhtar thought it
was important to have someone from
within the Muslim community argue
for approaching Islamic scripture as lit-
erature, as a source not of eternal truth
but of myth and metaphor.
This move is at the heart of Akhtar’s
play “The Who & the What” (2014),
whose protagonist, Zarina, scandalizes“I figured it was time to get a pet of my own.”