Patterson researches his novel about an attack on the United States. Excerpted from “Richard North Patterson,” May 11, 2011.

RICHARD NORTH PATTERSON, Author, A Devil’s Light and Exile

JONATHAN CURIEL, Author, ‘Al’ America – Moderator

CURIEL: Among the  people you interviewed for this book was Mohammed Fadlallah, who is often described as the spiritual leader of Hezbollah. You actually traveled to Lebanon and elsewhere. For example, you went to Ayn al-Hilweh, a very well known Palestinian refugee camp about an hour or so south of Beirut.

PATTERSON: I went there, and to Sabra and Shatila. Both scary places. You can’t imagine these conditions Palestinians live under in Lebanon: not allowed to vote, not allowed to hold jobs in most areas of work or most professions. That in itself is remarkable.

Fadlallah, one of the spiritual heads of the Shia world, was really an incredibly interesting man. I felt it necessary to speak to those folks to advance my knowledge. Obviously the government wasn’t arranging that for me, because he was on the terrorist list of the State Department until his death. Nonetheless, conversations with Hamas, Hezbollah, Fadlallah and others were very useful to try to create a rounded picture of what would have been an incredibly complex situation if you’re hunting for a bomb in the Middle East.

CURIEL: [Did] any of these interviews change your personal assessment of the Middle East and cause you to say, “Wait a minute, maybe U.S. policy is X, Y or Z?”

PATTERSON: That’s a complicated question. You don’t believe, obviously, when you’re talking to these folks, or any folks, everything you hear from them. I had an interesting conversation with Fadlallah about the bombing of the Marine Corps barracks in ’82, and the bombing of the American embassy in Beirut. He was alleged to have blessed those events before the fact. He said, essentially, without saying much about that, “You were on our soil; I don’t come to your soil. I condemned al-Qaida for 9/11. These were acts of resistance, not acts of terror.” It’s actually good to hear that point of view when you’re trying to figure out how these folks think.

CURIEL: A lot of your books are international best sellers. I’m wondering when you were in the Middle East whether, for example, if someone like Mohammed Fadlallah went, “Oh, of course, Mr. Patterson; I loved blah, blah, blah. Come on in.” Or were they a little wary of having this novelist come in?

PATTERSON: It is sort of funny; you sometimes have to jump through a few hoops. When I was talking to the Palestinians for Exile [Patterson’s 2007 novel about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict], and when I was talking to the Ayatollah Fadlallah, one thing you’re aware of is they don’t feel that their point of view is very well circulated in the Western press. So to the extent that you show up and can write, and someday something you say will get into print, they’re actually more keen to talk to you than other people might [be]. Because they have a feeling that they aren’t understood, that they are basically satirized and cast as terrorists in a one-size-fits-all sort of way, they’re quite fine with talking to you for the most part.

With Fadlallah, there is a priceless picture of me giving him a copy of Exile and him giving me a book on the dialogue between the Islamic and Western world. But I don’t think he was a fan before I showed up.