Book review: 'How To Fight Islamic Terror From The Missionary Position'

How To Fight Islamic Terror From The Missionary Position
Tabish Khair
Fourth Estate
190 pages
Rs450

I’m sitting next to a devout businessman on an Air India flight.

He’s very polite, and helps me with my luggage. I assume he’s devout because he frequently punctuates his conversation with the phrase “Ya Allah” — and so, I feel obliged to hide the cover of the book that I’m reading from him. This leads to various embarrassing incidents with a coffee cup and an altercation with an elderly gentlemen who takes offence when I try to take the book into the toilet with me.

The title of the book I’m going to such lengths to conceal — Tabish Khair’s How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position.

The novel begins in media res, as the narrator, a Pakistani professor of English literature in a Danish university (who Khair succeeds — impressively — in not naming for the entire length of the novel) attempts to fill a jar with sperm to fertilise his wife, waiting in a clinic around the corner.

He is interrupted, the jar is never filled, his wife divorces him — and this is how he comes to share a flat in Aarhus, Denmark with two Indians an extremely devout Muslim taxi driver named Karim bhai, and the charismatic Ravi, a PhD student from Mumbai.

It all begins with this act of coitus interruptus, the narrator tells us in the very first chapter, foreshadowing the end of the novel. And so when the much-anticipated ending, looming constantly over the plot, arrives after so carefully cultivated expectation, it is an anti-climax.

There’s only the phantom of Islamist terror and the missionary position makes one brief, seemingly unrelated appearance.

So what does this title refer to and what is this novel about?  How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position explores the thin line between the faith and fanaticism, the absolutes of love and faith in the varied contexts of religion, romance and family through the lives of the three main characters, the narrator and his two flatmates.

The title is also a pun — it doesn’t just refer to terrorism, but it is also about the terror the assimilated immigrant feels about the unassimilated. The missionary position, I suspect, is more than just a position. It refers not just to Karim bhai’s evangelical religiosity, but also alludes to the attitudes inculcated in the missionary-run schools in which Ravi and the narrator have studied.

How to Fight Islamist Terror... shares some of the concerns of Khair’s earlier novel, The Thing About Thugs, which was a sophisticated, complex work and meditated upon colonialism, literature and the act of reading. Like Syed Ali in The Thing About Thugs, the narrator here is the subject of a false, constructed personal narrative.

In lust with a character named Ms Linen Marx, the narrator can only engage her interest after his roommate Ravi feeds her a carefully-constructed fantasy that replaces the narrator’s liberal, Anglophilic, missionary-school educated background with a phantasm of a “veiled mother, bearded father, married at the age of fifteen.”

And in the midst of this, Khair himself, (who, like his un-named narrator, is a professor of English Literature living in Aarhus) makes an appearance in the last few pages on the novel as “an Indian writer — a chap called Khair — who had lived in Denmark some years ago” and the author of a story, “A State of Niceness”.

Deftly-written, wry and dramatic, How to Fight Islamic Terror... is, as one has come to expect from Khair, a narrative about the act of writing, reading and about literature.

Yet, the various themes and ideas of this novel don’t coalesce with the coherence seen in The Thing About Thugs. And — perhaps most unforgivably for this reader — the ending of this novel doesn’t live up to/justify the scandalous, exciting, dramatic promise of the title.