JIHADI JANE
Author: Tabish Khair
Publisher: Penguin
Price: Rs 299
Pages: 237
A recent spate of bombings and attacks all over the world - Dhaka to Istanbul, Medina to Baghdad - has served as a reminder, an especially cruel one during Ramadan, of the continued threat of the Islamic State (IS). Though the terror outfit suffered major setbacks in Iraq, losing Fallujah at the end of June, it continues to attract disillusioned people from all over the globe, including about 20 from Kerala last month, with the promise of a utopia. Tabish Khair's new novel follows two English girls who undertake the treacherous journey through Turkey and war-torn Syria to join the jihadis. It is an essential tale for our times - and a terrifying one.
The title of the novel is, quite obviously, inspired by Jihadi John, the British recruit who was purportedly seen beheading about 30 people in videos released by the Islamic State. Originally, Mohammed Emwazi, he was named "John" by a group of his hostages as he was part of a four-person terrorist cell called The Beatles because all its members had British accents. The "Jane" of the novel's title is Jamilla, the daughter of Pakistani immigrants. Her father and brother are taxi drivers and she frequents the local mosque. In high school, she befriends, Ameena, an independent-minded daughter of Indian immigrants with a healthy streak of teenage rebelliousness, who, after a heartbreak, directs her anger towards the outrages, real or imaginary, being perpetrated against Muslims around the world. Soon enough, they meet an IS recruiter on Twitter, who convinces them to travel to Syria.
The name "Jane" has other associations, too, indicating that jihadi brides are not radicalised "others" but common girls. In early 2015, three British schoolgirls, Shamima Begum, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase, disappeared from Turkey on their way to Syria. Alarmed reports exaggerated, claiming there was an exodus of youth from the West, all on their way to join the IS. A few months later, French journalist Anna Erelle posed as Melodie and became engaged to IS fighter Abou Bilel over Skype. Later, in an interview she said: "This is why girls go there - the promise of a good life. They are persuaded that it's paradise and they don't have any future in Britain or France." Thwarted in their ambitions by their social and economic circumstances, Jamilla and Ameena set out for the promised Islamic utopia - but, as they discover, all utopias essentially embody dystopias within themselves.
In his previous book, The New Xenophobia, published late last year, Khair wrote that unlike the older forms of direct violence, the newer variant of xenophobia, fostered by the growth of financial capitalism, was insidious, operating with a "push in" violence. The protagonists of the novel experience this in England, where they are discriminated against for wearing the hijab. (In a bathetic scene, an old feminist keeps shouting at Jamilla in a bus for covering herself up, and subscribing to an oppressive culture.) They hope to find more acceptance in the Islamic State - only to be sucked into a different kind of intolerance, even more rigid and unforgiving.
The second half of the book is a little weak - especially from the time Jamilla and Ameena arrive at a non-descript village near an unknown town inside the Islamic State. The violence, and oppression, they observe or experience is nothing new to the reader, who would have read the same newspaper reports and books that Khair must have used as source material. As they become caricatures, the jihadis lose their frightening power, and Yazidis (especially two women fighters captures by the IS) are merely representative. As a result, one starts losing the sympathy one would have felt for the trapped protagonists, and the climax seems a little contrived.
There's another quarrel with the narrative. The very first chapter, "Reading Scheme", probably the best in the book, sets up the debate between imagination and dogma. The eponymous villanelle by Wendy Cope is set as an exercise - and leads to a debate - for Jamilla, Ameena and their classmates in school. We are also introduced to James, an amateur poet and defender of both Cope's poem and Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. Jamilla and Ameena dismiss him as a liberal Western Christian - but it is not difficult to guess on which side Khair the novelist is. It is implied that caught up in the whirlwind of dogma the young girls are unable to appreciate poetry. He would have found a supporter in Azar Nafisi, who in her milestone text, Reading Lolita in Tehran, describes tyranny as a lack of imagination or empathy.
I would only agree partially with it: the jihadis and their supporters don't lack imagination but have a surfeit of it. In their article "Battle Lines" in the New Yorker, Robyn Creswell and Bernard Haykel, describing the poetry of the IS jihadis, write: "The Caliphate of ISIS [sic]... is a fantasy world of fluctuating borders where anything can happen, including the recapture of past glories." This fantasy is fuelled by, more than anything else, poetry - most of it sentimental and trite. It is not a lack of imagination but a surfeit that creates the hegemonic structure: if we ignore it, we tend to fall into the self-other dynamic that often informs western liberal thought. Khair's novel could have done better than that.
