One book. Two covers.

In 2014, while I was on a book tour for my memoir My Accidental Jihad, ISIS rose to global prominence as a terrorist organization thanks to its diabolical use of social media. My publisher feared that the word “jihad” would become an obstacle to book sales, and so they decided to scrap my title and redesign my book for its paperback release.

I implored them to reconsider. The book was selling well and being assigned at colleges and universities. I was receiving television, radio, and academic speaking invitations. I was having rich conversations with readers from all over the world. I was using. the term as every Muslim I knew understood it: to describe my ongoing internal struggle to overcome my ego and become a better human being. And that is the work of marriage. Couldn’t we use the controversy to our advantage? I asked. Otherwise, we’d be allowing terrorists to hijack the language of Islam.

The answer was no. So six months after publication my memoir was released in paperback as A Tender Struggle. Readers purchased it assuming it was a new book. This experience taught me important lessons about the world of publishing: the assumptions made about readers (such as that they are white, or non-Muslim); the lack of diversity in this business (a Muslim editor would have advocated for a different outcome); the ways personal stories collide with political realities in the marketplace; and the limits of an author’s control over their own work.