Coming, Tabish Khair’s satirical book on ‘Islamic’ terror and Western reaction

By TCN News,

New Delhi: ‘Islamic’ terror is a much-hyped, written and debated topic the world over, but not many writers have successfully attempted to write fiction on the issue. It’s in this context that literati have quite a lot of expectations from Tabish Khair, whose much-awaited novel, “How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position” is due to be released in April this year.

According to interviews given to the media by Tabish Khair, who is a professor at Aarhus University in Denmark, the novel is a satire on both ‘Islamic’ terror and Western response to the issue. In spite of this the first thing which is going to catch your attention about the book is its title which says something on ‘Islamic’ terror and not surprisingly media has highlighted the novel that way alone.

According to Siyahi, a literary portal, “How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position” tells the interlinked stories of three unforgettable men – the flamboyant Ravi, the fundamentalist Karim and the unnamed and pragmatic Pakistani narrator – whose trajectories cross in Aarhus, and are complicated by the Danish Prophet Mohammad cartoon controversy.

In the book, which is a love story set in Denmark featuring Indian and Pakistani youths in the background of the Danish cartoon of the Prophet, the Bihar born writer has brought together and played with the thematic elements of crime thriller, the immigrant novel, the campus novel, and the young adult romance to produce a stinging satire on ‘Islamic’ terror and the way West reacts to the issue.

“How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position” is the 4th novel of Tabish Khair who claims to have “mostly lived on the periphery - first a small town in Bihar, now a small town in Denmark” as “the minority of colored people in Denmark, the minority of immigrants, the minority of Indians, of Muslims.”

Khair’s third novel The Thing About Thugs was shortlisted for the 2012 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, the Man Asian Literary Prize of 2011 and the 2010 Hindu Best Fiction Prize. He won the All India Poetry Prize for Where Parallel Lines Meet (2000).