In the heart of darkness

Seema Sachdeva

The title of Tabish Khair’s latest work rings a familiar bell in a world where Islamic radicalism and jihad are a living reality. Jihadi Jane hits you hard. Actually, very hard because this work of fiction doesn’t appear to be so. The novel, which has been released as Just Another Jihadi Jane in the US and the UK, captures the life of two British Muslim girls Ameena and Jamilla, and how they get sucked into extremist Islam after being entranced by a powerful internet preacher. This tale, which is being narrated by Jamilla, has everything in it — violence, persecution, frustration, and guilt.

High school best friends Ameena and Jamilla are different in every way. When the book begins, one finds Ameena as a vivacious young Muslim girl, a secret smoker. A dedicated photographer, she would go about the streets clicking pictures.

Her classmate Jamilla, however, is just the opposite. Coming from a family of orthodox Muslims, she is part of a small of group of girls who follow Islamic precepts. Wearing a scarf to cover her head, and later a hijab, is something that comes naturally to Jamilla, the ‘scarfie’ or a ‘nunja’, as Ameena calls her. The two come together after Ameena’s mother, a divorcee, moves into a society close to Jamilla’s. And so begins a friendship that will take them through the nightmarish experiences they face later.

When Ameena gets disillusioned with her world following a breakup with her boyfriend Alex, she tries to find comfort in Jamilla’s religion. However, her ideological interpretation of Islam is very different from Jamilla’s Allah of endless doubts and her brother Mohammad’s unquestioning Islam.

When the girls leave their families and country behind to join the Islamic State in Syria to serve for a cause they unquestioningly believe in, they both have different reasons — Ameena wants to get head-on in her ‘righteous fight’ while Jamilla wants to escape getting married.

However, as things begin to change for the worse, there is disillusionment with their mission. The book ends with words like sacrifice, historical justice and national freedom sounding partly hollow.

Interestingly, there are no exact details about anything in the narrative. Even the names are not real, not even those of the protagonists Ameena and Jamilla. The later lives with a fake identity under a fake passport.

There are, of course, many generalisations. The town in Syria, where the two women finally reach is called The Town, because it could be any town or city which has been a witness to terror attacks, bombings and destruction. Similarly, the internet preacher with the Twitter name of Hejjiye, who trains young girls in her orphanage to become suicide bombers, is merely a persona.

The well-structured narrative is racy yet gripping in spite of its simplicity. The build-up to the heart-wrenching climax is equally effective.

The narrative is laden with many perspectives. There is religious hypocrisy and there is madness of militant Islamism. And then, there is dichotomy of the western mind.

“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”. As Jamilla says, it builds up ‘core of bitterness’ in you.

The narrative also tries to penetrate into the mind of a suicide bomber. Struck with the thought of her imminent death, Jamilla realises, “It struck me that people like Hejjiye are always driven to safety — and in every culture…. People like her always manage to be driven to safety while someone else dies for their causes. ”

The book by India-born author, who is presently teaching as Associate Professor at Aarhus University Denmark, shows a disturbing picture of the world we live in.