THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS
How do youngsters become radicalised? A novelist’s brave attempt to find answers
Tabish Khair, in Jihadi Jane, a novel plucked from the headlines, attempts to show how two ordinary Muslim girls from Yorkshire might find themselves in Syria betrothed to holy warriors, deeply committed to the cause of Daesh. Writing in his blog, Amitav Ghosh noted that “[r]arely has a novel seemed so timely”. The likes of John Updike and Martin Amis, with embarrassing results, have tried to channel terrorists, to ventriloquise, to imagine their motivations and thought processes. Khair tries something even more complicated—to write in the voice of a girl, barely out of school, from a working class, conservative Muslim family. Jamilla is serious, solemn, aware of her beauty but determined to overcome it, to not let it distract from her devotion to her religion, to virtue. She has imbibed an Arab-infected Islam, a Wahabi-style orthodoxy that overwhelms with the force of its self-righteousness all other Muslim experience or cultural practice.
If Jamilla comes from a conservative family, her friend Ameena’s background is middle class, contemporary and liberal. Ameena’s mother is a teacher, and her father, a fashy man fond of cars and suits with the looks of an ageing Leander Paes, is a banker. Divorce means Ameena ends up in the same grim block of fats as Jamilla. Ameena’s mother, harried and overworked, bears the brunt of her rebellion, while her father fits in and out of her life displaying new cars and new girlfriends, an immature, absentee parent with little apparent interest in his daughter. Ameena’s rebellion begins in the traditional way of cigarettes and making out with boys behind the bike sheds before heartbreak and bullying become the catalyst for an embrace of faith, for the companionship found in the mosque and jihadi chat sites. It was Jamilla who was the more committed Muslim, going to school in her hijab, looking like a “nunja”, until Ameena turned into a zealot.
Finding themselves in Istanbul, on their way to Syria, where Ameena has agreed to marry a militant, Jamilla refects on what has brought them to this point. “You might wonder,” she tells her interlocutor, “how I could be tempted .... I had grown up in a family where the men complained relentlessly about the compromises that living in England entailed for their faith...but trust me, no man, not one Muslim man, no matter how believing, how faithful, how orthodox, has to face a third of the difficulties that orthodox Muslim women encounter in the West...the way you want to dress, interact, meet or not meet other people, and live, all of it is under constant assault by ordinary life in the West.”
In Syria, having driven three days from Raqqa, the girls find themselves working for a woman who runs an orphanage. Their paths diverge. Ameena disappears into her marriage with the cartoonishly villainous Hassan. Ameena, Jamilla says, “could not help noticing the gratuitous violence that Hassan practised under the cloak of his Islam .... Given the choice between a lesser punishment and a greater one, he inevitably chose the more gory option. Ameena realised that he looked truly happy only when he left an execution site, wiping the sword on his fatigues, his face splattered with blood.” Jamilla is telling the story of what happened to her and Ameena, how they went from school in Yorkshire to Syria and Daesh, to a novelist. She chooses him because he says during a reading that Westerners who forsake their homelands to fight on the side of the jihadis “ought not to be allowed back to any democratic, yes, let’s say it, any civilised place”. Their story, hers and Ameena’s, is thus framed as a counter. But Khair can’t move beyond the Manichean position of good and evil, light and dark. Jamilla and Ameena may not be evil, may indeed be good, but there is no question in this novel that ISIS is peopled by evil fanatics. Jihadi Jane is a mildly diverting thriller but there are no deeper truths to be found. Perhaps that question of how young people in Europe become radicalised has no answer. Or at least the answer is different every time, hopelessly particular, specific, individual. And what is a novelist supposed to do with that?