Being Muslim in a polarised world

Ranjit Powar

Fatima Bhutto — it’s a famous name, and also a name marked with sanguine sagas in South-Asian history. “In a way, violence is always described in stark black-and-white terms these days and I wanted to think about it in a different way. How much pain do you have to be in to go to war against the world? What does it mean to feel wounded by the world, to be humiliated and isolated? I am haunted by the violence I’ve experienced. You have to expose violence to light, to air, it’s the only way you can rob it of its power,” says Bhutto. This novel reflects a cathartic expression of the violence in her personal life experiences. 

The story traces the suppressed and directionless lives of three youngsters from different social milieus, all in search of self worth and validation. Sunny, an Indian Muslim expat in Portsmouth, is bullied and belittled by the Whites and his own kind. He is ashamed of the pathetic efforts his father makes to be accepted into the White society. His cousin Oz returns from Syria to show him a way out of this mist of pain, loneliness and confusion to glory and heroism through ‘jihad’.

Monty, son of an elitist family of Karachi, has the swankiest cars and every other affordable luxury, but feels a nagging sense of inadequacy due to a pervasive, unidentified fear. He is smitten by Anita Rose for her fearlessness and brash confidence in spite of her being on the opposite side of the spectrum — a minority Christian family living in the faceless labyrinth of a slum in the same shiny city. It is paradoxical how Sunny and Anita, growing up in bigoted scenarios of suppressive and belittling social, religious and domestic violence, choose to become part of radical fundamentalism and embrace greater violence to find an elusive sense of identity, power and restitution in a world of rejection.

The lives of these three frustrated youngsters are destined to cross paths in the dreaded wasteland of Mosul, where a bloody orgy of violence pushes them down a dark path of no return — the path that was to lead them to the promised paradise.

The author attempts to portray the religious brainwashing and subsequent recruitment of vulnerable youngsters into the so-called religious war against the West, and the irony that it has, in fact, little to do with religion and much to do with distorted mind frames and power games. 

In spite of the racy subject, the narrative is listless and devoid of any thrill, surprises or excitement. Characters are sketchy and come across as unfinished portraits that fail to evoke much empathy. There are infrequent oases of literary redemption in the book through some well-scripted paragraphs and phrases, but the rest of the road is a trudge.