her community by writing a novel that
treats Muhammad as an ordinary per
son with sexual impulses and moral flaws.
The play uses comedy as a salve in the
way that “Disgraced” uses drama as a
torch; audiences around the world loved
it. (A production has run at Vienna’s
Burgtheater for the past two years.) A
friend of Akhtar’s went to a performance
at Lincoln Center. “He called me and
he said, ‘I can’t believe what you’re doing.’
I said, ‘Well, what do you mean?’ He
said, ‘Why are you humiliating us like
that?’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’
He said, ‘They were laughing at us.’ I
said, ‘No, no, they were laughing with
us!’ He’s, like, ‘No, I was in that audi
ence. How dare you say those things
about the Prophet?’ This is a secular
Muslim, a neurosurgeon in Chicago.”
Akhtar is wary of what he sees as
a limiting trend, in American theatre
and literature, of writers making work
that strives to promote, rather than to
interrogate, their racial or ethnic iden
tities. “The audience is increasingly re
sponding to the politics of represen
tation,” he said. “But I don’t think an
artist should be in advertising, which
is sometimes what I worry we are be
coming—advocates for certain points
of view, as opposed to thoughtful insti
gators. It can go all the way back to
Horace. What’s the purpose of art, to
delight or instruct?” Such committed
iconoclasm can sometimes put Akhtar
in strange positions. When the long
running Viennese production of “The
Who & the What” opened, in 2018, it
featured an allwhite cast. He was ini
tially disturbed, but the performance
won him over; German audiences rec
ognized their own families in the Pa
kistani characters onstage.
At the same time, there are plenty
of sympathetic white audiences who
miss the point. “Disgraced” depicts the
myopia of the white ally in the charac
ter of Emily, Amir’s wife, a painter who
works with Islamic imagery and takes
it upon herself to defend Islam to her
husband. Akhtar finds that many audi
ence members are “Emilys,” too intent
on proving that they get the message to
listen to what he’s trying to say. “The
question I hear more often than any
other is: ‘Why is it called “Disgraced”?’”
he told me. “And this, many times when
I have ascended the stage mere minutes
after the curtain has dropped, is itself
just a few minutes removed from a
monologue downstage center, in which
a character, addressing the audience, al
most, uses the word twice in a mono
logue that is clearly a capstone speech
to the experience that they’ve just had.”
We were sitting in the covered back
yard of a restaurant in Hudson, New
York. It was raining hard. Akhtar was
adamant, almost agitated. The speech
he was referring to is given by Amir’s
nephew, who begins the play as an
assimilated American youth and ends it
as a devout Muslim with an unsettling
attraction to extremism. Akhtar went
on, “But somehow they can’t hear that,
because all they see is a young Muslim
who’s angry. In a skullcap. That’s not my
problem. I am trying to give rich, polit
ical language to a subject who is oftendenied that, on stages and elsewhere.
But the concussive conclusion on the
part of an often well meaning audience
that is concerned about Muslim repre
sentations onstage is that simply seeing
that reference, and seeing those short
hand symbols, cancels him as a legiti
mate representation of a Muslim point
of view, when he is absolutely that.”
Akhtar’s face cleared. He smiled.
This was a performance he had given
many times, usually to the person in
the audience who had made the mis
take of asking the question.
One person who loved “Disgraced”
without qualification was Akhtar’s fa
ther. “Now I can die happy,” Masood
told him, at the New York première. At
the afterparty, Masood posed as a jour
nalist, excitedly interviewing guests
about their reactions and reporting back
to his son. (Akhtar’s celebratory evening
was derailed when his father got drunk
and wandered off into the city alone; he
had to be retrieved the next morning
from Central Park.) Akhtar’s mother,
too, found a way to let her son know
that he had her support. When he gave
her a copy of “American Dervish,” it
was with trepidation: would she feel that
he had condoned his father’s behavior
toward her? After she read it, she told
him, “I was happy to see you understood
everybody was doing their best.”W
hen you win the Pulitzer for
drama, a lot of people will want
to be your friend. They will take you
to parties and then leave with the per
son they brought you there to impress.