In Wanted Women, Deborah Scroggins explores conflict in the Islamic world through the experiences of two fascinating and very different women .

Both Hirsi Ali and Siddiqui are charismatic but not necessarily sympathetic figures for American readers. Did this worry you during the writing process?

Yes, it did. When I started out, I thought Hirsi Ali would be the straightforward heroine and Siddiqui the villain. But I discovered that they were just too human to be pigeonholed. Hirsi Ali, who has been portrayed as an icon of women’s rights, bravery, and even Western civilization, turned out to have some interesting flaws, and a lot of the Joan of Arc rhetoric about her turned out to be credulous, hysterical, and sometimes quite cynical. Even Siddiqui—the icon of an increasingly blind Islamism—had a weirdly idealistic streak as well as a delusional streak.

The “war on terror” has become shorthand for our climate of fear post-9/11. What strategies did you use to go deeper than the buzzwords?

My strategy was simply to follow the two women’s stories wherever they led. Hirsi Ali, for instance, ended up offending millions not so much because she advocated women’s rights as because she made hostile and ignorant generalizations about Islam and Muslims. And Siddiqui was not a helpless victim of mistaken identity, as millions of Pakistanis and others believe to this day, and as I once thought might be true. She was a full-blown supporter of religious war and a repulsive anti-Semite. So Hirsi Ali’s Muslim critics weren’t just crazed misogynists and the U.S. was correct to suspect Siddiqui of being a major security threat.

What do you want readers to take away from your book, particularly about the differences between the religion of Islam and political Islam?

We make a terrible mistake when we lump the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims into the same ideological box. In particular, we need to distinguish between Islam the religion, and Islamism the political ideology that calls for creating states based on Islamic religious law. Even within Islamism there are important shades of belief, with the violent jihadis on the extreme fringe. When we insist they’re essentially the same, as both Hirsi Ali and Siddiqui often did, we push ordinary Muslims into the arms of our enemies.

Hirsi Ali made a name for herself in Holland’s Parliament before coming to the United States following revelations that she lied on her asylum application. Why do you think the anti-immigration American right welcomed her?

Hirsi Ali’s admirers on the right accept her story that she was trying to escape a forced marriage and feared that her family might track her down. They don’t know or care about the evidence that she came to the West like millions of other illegal immigrants—because she wanted choices and opportunities she didn’t have in Africa—and that she lied because that was the only way she could stay in Holland. They don’t want to think about the contradictions in her story because then it wouldn’t be a simple parable about a young woman fleeing evil Islam only to be liberated by the West.