STATE OF MIND

Kamila Shamsie on the perils of researching a novel about IS recruitment in Britain

In January 2014, three months after I became a British citizen, the then Home Secretary Theresa May announced a scheme, backed by the Lib Dems, to strip foreign-born British citizens of their citizenship if they are judged to pose a threat to national security. With my own passport still so fresh in my hands I realised that all Britons were not equal. Some of us were citizens and others – the foreign-born – were citizens with conditions. I had spent six years being naturalised, and the changes in the laws felt very personal. It was hardly surprising, then, that this issue found its way into my novel, Home Fire, which includes a young British-Pakistani man whose citizenship is revoked once he becomes a target for an Islamic State recruiter.

Looking into citizenship laws was relatively straightforward. But once I got going with the novel, I realised there were other topics that I needed to delve into, topics that led me mentally to prepare a defence in case MI5 came knocking on my door to find out if I was planning to join a terrorist group. I couldn’t, it turned out, write about the young man without researching both life in Raqqa and methods of recruitment by IS. I began to joke with friends that in the event of that knock on the door, my excuse would be ‘Of course I’m not a terrorist – I’ve been on Radio 4’. It was a joke, and yet it wasn’t a joke. I would sit at my computer reading articles about IS, and I’d work on explanations and justifications to proffer in case anyone asked me to account for it. Simply saying ‘I’m a novelist’ wouldn’t do, because I’m not only a novelist, I’m also Muslim, and foreignborn at that. So I devised strategies – I wouldn’t look at more than a certain number of websites in one go or on one day; I wouldn’t look at ‘primary sources’ such as IS’ media output and instead would rely on what the BBC or some (preferably white) anti-extremist researcher might report on those sources; I would use a proxy server – no, wait, if someone worked that out, it would look as though I were trying to hide something so I absolutely wouldn’t use a proxy server…

Was I being paranoid? Quite possibly. But if so, it was a shared British paranoia. Those who knew what I was working on – fellow novelists, journalists, old friends from Pakistan who, like me, were now British citizens, asked: ‘Aren’t you worried about going online to research that? ’ I was prepared for my hesitation at the idea of seeing certain kinds of barbaric images that existed; but I had underestimated the extent to which the fear of the surveillance state had crept into that part of my mind that needed to be free to explore and understand. Of course, that fear became something I could write into the novel; the young man in question tries to learn as little as possible about IS because he doesn’t want anyone to wonder why a 19-year-old British Muslim man is interested in the subject; perversely, his lack of information makes him an easier target for the recruiter.

And how did I square my own fears and paranoia with my need to do the necessary research for the book? I waited until I was in Pakistan for the winter. Given that I had grown up under military rule, thinking of Pakistan as a surveillance state and the UK a place where curiosity could roam free, the irony of this was not lost on me. In trying to combat the lure of IS, the UK had taken to using the tools of authoritarianism: surveillance, fear, different laws for different groups of citizens. I knew I couldn’t write a happy ending from this: fine from a writer’s point of view, but saddening from a newly minted British citizen’s perspective.

‘Home Fire’ by Kamila Shamsie (£16.99, Bloomsbury) is published on 7 September.