Quebec mosque killings inspired new book in series
Author faces issues of racism, Islamophobia head-on after years of exploring themes
Ausma Zehanat Khan had been tracking hate crimes for a couple years when in 2017, a young white man opened fire and killed six people, injuring 19 more inside a Quebec City mosque. Khan, who has a PhD. in international human rights law, had observed a rise in hate speech and racist crimes against Muslims, and a clear connection to the anti-Islamic vitriol being shared on far-right media outlets and on social media.
For Khan, the best way to address this hatred was to continue writing. The Quebec City killings became the launching point for A Deadly Divide, the sixth, and potentially final title in her Esa Khattak/Rachel Getty detective series.
Although her two cops live in Toronto, Khan’s novels travel further afield as her protagonists — Esa, a passionate Muslim police inspector, and Rachel, his younger but capable partner — become embroiled in crimes with international scope. In A Deadly Divide, they travel to a Quebec town rocked by a mass shooting at its only mosque. The two are assigned as community liaisons while the local police look for suspects. Meanwhile, the university’s Muslim centre is defaced, which may be connected to a local radio host intent on ratcheting up tension. “I’m always thinking about how we move from a moment of propaganda and hateful rhetoric to how that translates into reactions and then ultimately into hate crimes or genocide,” says Khan from her home in Colorado. “I’ve been consistently writing about these themes of anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia and I knew that ultimately I would have to look it in the face and look at its most dramatic or severe impact on my detective Esa and on the community.”
A Deadly Divide’s narrative is cut with excerpts from fictional message boards and blogs related to the case. As part of her research, Khan scrolled through anti-Muslim groups on Facebook, gauging online responses to events like the Quebec shooting. She drew her text directly to show the kind of hateful rhetoric that minority communities encounter all the time.
“You have a whole gamut of expressions from defensive to vastly unapologetic. And then there’s an extreme element which is looking at it as inspiration for further violence, or like a signpost of what to do next,” she says. “There are times when I would keep reading, and saying, ‘This can’t be real, people can’t actually be saying these kinds of things in a public forum and meaning them. Maybe they’re blowing off steam?’ But it would just get hotter and hotter.”
Khan, who was born in England, was mostly raised in Toronto, where her parents still live. Although she left behind a career teaching international law to become editor-in-chief of the now-defunct Muslim Girl magazine, which mixed style advice with stories that promoted cultural values, her legal knowledge became instrumental in her fiction writing. Her first novel, The Unquiet Dead, drew on her studies of the1995 massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica. From the onset, her books garnered praise for balancing social messages, character development and good ol’-fashioned detective work.
“When you’re telling these kinds of stories, you don’t want them to be thought of as message books or coming across as didactic,” Khan says. “You want to tell a story that will engage audiences, and you want them to keep turning the pages desperate to know the ending.”
Over six books, Khan has fought the impulse to write heavy-handed scenes. She listened to her editors’ advice that less is more when it comes to emotional impact. “I learned that two characters holding hands or praying together is so much more impactful than me delivering two or three pages of why hate speech or hate crimes are clearly wrong,” she says.
A Deadly Divide ends with a cliffhanger, but what happens next to Esa and Rachel may never be resolved. In the four years she’s been publishing, Khan also wrote two titles for another fantasy series about a female-led resistance and a kids’ book on Ramadan. She may return to her detectives someday, but right now she is looking toward a new project that will connect many of the themes in her novels.
“I like the idea that writing can be a calling and that it can deliver something that’s important to us. I think every writer is probably doing that in a different way, but I’m very conscious that I have a platform, I have an opportunity,” Khan says. “Writing is much more than a means of entertaining myself. It has a purpose, but having said that, I want my books to be seen. It’s fiction, but hopefully fiction that can deepen our empathy for each other.”