HOW TO FIGHT ISLAMIST TERROR FROM THE MISSIONARY POSITION is not only the best title of a book this year, but one of the funniest, most biting books of the year.
The novel begins with the narrator giving himself a hand job behind the steering wheel of a Hyundai i10, desperately jerking off into a plastic container with a label bearing the name and social security number of his wife.
“This was before time had interfered, with its slow erosion of the cliffs of certainty, its full storms and hollow caves”.
A sort of literate bro-ro, it features the narrator, a Pakistani English academic and an Indian Ph.D. student, Ravi, who call each other bastard, a term of affection, as it usually is in the subcontinent between men who share a catholic missionary school education.
They share a cramped apartment in Aarhus, Denmark, with their landlord, Karim, a devout Muslim.
The narrator is apostate Islam, while Ravi an apostate Hindu harbours a flirtation with the religion stemming from it’s perceived pillory by the west.
“Ravi argued that Islamism, because it considered Islam universally valid for all human beings, could not be fascist, because fascism was an ideology of ethnic, racist or nationalist exclusiveness.
He might have been right, intellectually. But what Ravi forgot was that Islam, like any other religion or even an atheistic ideology like communism, could be put to fascist uses, and that many Islamic fundamentalists – with their mobs and chanting, their whips and executions, their insistence on absolute obedience – behaved very much like fascists”.
HOW TO FIGHT ISLAMIST TERROR FROM THE MISSIONARY POSITION examines how the worst of Muslim and Christian fanaticism draw sustenance from the equally bad across their over-dramatised chasms, and the poisonous suspicion and venomous vitriol it produces. Khair quotes Yeats, “the best lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
Blithe and witty and tremendously textured, this mature comic novel comes from Tabish Khair, who takes great care and craft with his writing. You know you should be sipping this stupendous steamroller of a story but you can’t help but quaff. His words, sentences and paragraphs have enormous mouth feel with delicious dialogue and a narrative that’s nourishing both to the brain pan and the funny bone.
This is a not for prophet book, neither is it a mullah maul. For the most part its an hilarious look at the migrant experience, a sort of They’re a Weird Mob for modern Asian men living in Scandinavia, a missal of mirth, a hadith of humour, not so much a bible black comedy as an irreverent romp through post 9/11 twain strain.
HOW TO FIGHT ISLAMIST TERROR FROM THE MISSIONARY POSITION by Tabish Khair is published by Corsair.