The war within

One could call it a story of two girls coming of age in a strange sort of way. Or, a story exclusively about the terrible terror that the world has seen through past decades in the name of religion, particularly, Islam. One could even call it a novel about the so-called civilisational clash. To this writer, however, Jihadi Jane is a tale of isolation. This isolation tears simple young girls from their families, religious or liberal, and renders them pawns in the hands of terrorist masters, or drives us readers towards a world of narrow dogma and failed dreams, a collective tragedy. In that, this book, known elsewhere as Just Another Jihadi Jane , is a deeply dystopian novel.

In an Atwoodian sense, Tabish Khair, also a poet, harps on the bleakness of modern life, showing us the disparate lives of Ameena and Jamilla — one a spunky young female experimenting with all the spoils of youth, and the other a demure girl clinging to her conservative milieu and the safety of the hijab. Why has Khair chosen two Muslim youngsters, women, to make this point, one might wonder. Thanks to round-the-clock electronic print and digital media, news of terrorism travels fast but fear travels even faster. This is a world where cruel men are in charge and young men recruited for bloodthirsty projects such as the Daesh, the stuff of Hollywood action movies. Indeed, it is a stroke of brilliance that Khair attempts to show the changing, debilitating world through the eyes of a female protagonist for matters this serious and sinister.

Isolation is a major reason why Ameena and Jamilla, despite their radically different upbringing, will meet and confide in their Yorkshire backdrop, a place where material comforts are a given. This is where the young women turn to the world of internet faith-mongering by crafty and nefarious characters such as Hejjiye. She reminds one of Meryl Streep’s boss-woman from The Devil Wears Prada , a figure one can laugh at, sympathise with, or just unfold. The difference here, of course, is that Hejjiye does not hold any promise of an alternative world for Ameena and Jamilla. She represents the downward spiral of violence and spiritual slavery that the girls are unaware of, and will soon learn about once they have left for Syria.

The deft storytelling — the prose is straightforward and in first person — of Khair doesn’t take the reader to be naïve.

In today’s world, most are familiar with the fanaticism peddled by fundamentalists, the rise of polarisation in the West and elsewhere, the bloodlust of so-called “freedom” fighters, the deep nexus of politicians and arms dealers, and the bottomless pit that individuals are dumped in as soon as they believe in a paradise of absurd gains. All this and more go into the bedrock of the book.

Following the girls’ flight to join their newly acquired religious mission in Syria, Ameena’s marriage to Hassan, a jihadi leader of the Islamic State, and Jamilla’s obeisance to all things laced with the semblance of religious piety while she lives in an orphanage of sorts, unleashes terrible realities.

The turning point is akin to a moral death, as we have witnessed in the countless brutal incidents in Baghdad, Istanbul, Dhaka, and elsewhere in real life. The turpitude is Dante’s descent into Hell. Only, hell here is a never-ending experience.

The novel describes a frightening terrain where there is no point of return.

If Jamilla is able to tell us the story in first person, perhaps it is only because she has seen her dear friend Ameena call upon herself a doomed destiny. About to enter Syria, her dialectal exclamation: “Allah, it is really t’Euphrates! A thought it exists only in me textbooks!” lays bare the fact that a seemingly peaceful cartographic world and the actual world of marauding men and machines are at discord with each other. The entry to Syria itself, Raqqa, and Hejjiye’s “Town” — these are topographies that illustrate what the world sees today as trouble spots. From olives to roses to grains to flatlands to broken buildings to gutted shops to bullet-ridden doors, the journey is one of despair.

One might imagine the purpose of this fiction to be just sensationalising the worldwide feeling of Islamophobia. Instead, Khair prods our conscience. The prejudices and presumptions that outline the characters in the book are very much a part of our own worldview, whatever religious or cultural mores we adhere to.

The title, Jihadi Jane , in its apt alliteration, captures the imagination of both a Western and a subcontinental reader. The ‘Jane’ could live on as a normal woman if she did not give in to the coercion of the global terror trap. She would be another woman with an unremarkable life. But in choosing to be “jihadi” and special, she has destroyed her own chances of redemption, an idea contrary to the notion of jihad as preached by the religious fanatics. Khair brings, if one may be permitted to say so, an insider’s knowledge, and expresses it deftly from a woman’s perspective. What one finds towards the end, however, are interesting turns of plot that demand longer stories of their own. Ameena and her final call, Jamilla’s “freedom” to an unknownness, the fate of the other women freed from the evil establishment: all of these read as a bit of a fast-forward. Therefore, perhaps Jihadi Jane ought to have a sequel.

Nabina Das is a poet and fiction writer currently living in Hyderabad and teaching creative writing

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