Make Love, Not War
- By Jim Hicks
“Witty and incisive, but insubstantial.” Somewhere someone must have a rule that says never begin a review by citing another review. And yet here I simply can’t resist, in part because the Kirkus Review’s final word on Tabish Khair’s brilliant new book, How to Fight Islamic Terror from the Missionary Position, explicitly retreads its earlier judgment on his magisterial novel, The Thing about Thugs. In that case, “Smart, entertaining—but not quite satisfying.” When successive, generally competent commentaries stumble twice into same mainstream error, I tend to think something interesting is afoot. What that something is, in brief, has already been observed by Indra Sinha, the author of Animal’s People. Of reading Islamic Terror, he notes that “its final joy [. . .] is the realization that, like all great books, it has actually been reading you.” Just so. That so-called substantial stuff that Kirkus might find satisfying? Well, it’s precisely what Khair’s work takes on, and opposes. All the more reason to read him.
In case you’re wondering, yes, MR has a dog in this fight. We first published Tabish Khair back in 2000 and we also ran a pre-publication excerpt from Thugs in our 2012 Summer issue. I’ve also already written about that novel in this blog (http://www.massreview.org/blog/whats-face). Like any small magazine or small press, we put heart and soul into our work, and when we publish someone more than once, we do so because we consider them one of our own. If I tell you a bit more about Khair’s new book, you’ll understand why.
How to Fight Islamic Terror from the Missionary Position is his first novel set in contemporary Denmark (where Khair has lived, mostly, since completing his Ph.D in Copenhagen in 2000). From the book’s unnamed narrator, we learn the backstory to events said to “have exercised considerable media attention in Denmark in recent months.” As this “more or less Muslim-skinned man” tells it, his own connection to the events in question evolved out of a decision taken, after a divorce, to share a flat with his friend and university colleague Ravi, in rooms rented to them by its owner-occupant, the taxi driver Karim. Since we readers don’t learn what headlines are at issue until the book’s concluding pages, I’m certainly not going to spoil it for you here. But I can say that, in addition to the Pakistani narrator, his Indian friend Ravi, and Karim, who is also from India, this news story affects the lives of a Bosnian girl, her Somali husband, and a shady character named Ali (all of whom attend Karim’s Friday Quran study sessions), plus an assortment of purely Danish friends and neighbors.
In commenting on the book, the Kirkus Review begins well enough, noting its “curious fusion of social observation, romantic philosophy, comedy, and morality tale.” If by “romantic philosophy” their reviewer meant “sentimental education,” then the diagnosis is precise and Khair’s novel placed where it belongs, alongside works by Stendhal, Goethe, Flaubert and countless others—that great narrative tradition where the forces of history are distilled into a potent elixir of interpersonal and amorous relations. As both its title and cast of characters suggest, this particular novel winds its trail through the minefields that today surround immigrant lives, mapping out its plot from this in-between perspective, its eccentric eye fixed on the so-called receiving culture. How, or whether, cultures receive at all is the wager put on the table.
For Kirkus, the central problem of How to Fight Islamist Terror is that the novel seems “more preoccupied with [Ravi and the narrator’s] search for women”—that “Khair spends more time considering relationships” than he does Islamist terror—and that this “strange balance [. . .] renders the act of violence that eventually occurs almost incidental.” Like Napoleon in The Charterhouse of Parma, violence does indeed come onstage late, and as a minor character, though its effects are legion. The novel’s true compass is instead found in the character of Ravi, the irresistable Hindu intellectual, with his equal parts of sentimentality and sarcasm. Ravi’s love affair with the too perfect Dane Lena is the heart of the story: Ravi also decides that the two friends should rent from Karim; Ravi’s success in matchmaking produces for the narrator a “half glass of love”; and, when Ravi finally decides to abandon his Ph.D and return to India, the novel comes to a close.
Also key is the narrator’s decision to go with Ravi to the police, and offer testimony together against their friend and landlord Karim; this move—born from the narrator’s fear for his own safety—precipitates the final split between the novel’s three main characters. In the closing pages, and in the absence of Ravi, the narrator hides in order to avoid a last encounter with Karim, and the scene left unstaged is heartbreaking, its silence deafening. The “impossibility of conversation,” the “Niagara of suspicion and prejudice and brashness” that separates these two Muslim characters is tragic, but indisputably the way of the world today. In a climate of fear, we make war, not love. That Kirkus finds this “insubstantial” is a symptom of that same Niagara: to characterize Islamophobia, today marking even the consciousness of Muslims themselves, as lacking in weight and seriousness is itself an effect of fear, causing the other to remain less than fully real, or truly substantial, in comparison with the self.
In Muslim Modernities (2008), a book of essays, Khair notes that even though he doesn’t feel very religious, as of late he has begun answering the inevitable question simply with “I am Muslim.” He comments, “I refuse to give [Islamophobic] people the soft option of not facing up to and acting on their prejudices [. . . .] I am not ashamed of being Muslim or Indian or coloured or anything else that has descended on me through time and as such carries with it the complexities— neither entirely good nor entirely bad— of history.”
In his novel as well, Tabish Khair refuses the “soft option.” To read, or to resist reading, How to Fight Islamist Terror From the Missionary Position is to acknowledge, or at least entertain for a time, that possibility—that our everyday lives, our relations with others, and even our dreams may some day break free from the prejudices and preconceptions that cascade around us, threatening to narrate the whole of our existence, and to separate us irrevocably from each other. If, on the contrary, this fails to occur, Khair’s book will not only have read us, it will have judged us as well.
