How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position by Tabish Khair (review)

Tabish Khair's How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position imposes itself on the genre of the academic novel—insofar as there is agreement that there is such a genre—in an idiosyncratic way. Eschewing easy parody and satire, it thematizes some of the most pressing challenges and conditions that confront higher education in the second decade of the twenty first century and especially in the humanities and liberal arts. Though the novel is set in Århus, Denmark, circa 2005, the themes, tropes, and sources of conflict it engages resemble the professional and institutional conversations that characterize US higher education. This suggests that there is some international dimension to the "crisis of the humanities." The novel speaks to the dilemmas of tenure and what one must endure and demonstrate to earn it, unethical labor practices, as well as the suspicion that multicultural initiatives, and postcolonial studies in English departments in particular, are largely additive, perfunctory, and unlikely to really decolonize the curriculum and decenter Eurocentric principles, perspectives, and canons.

As a literature professor, Khair's narrator is keenly aware of language itself, various genres of writing, and the discourse communities that cohere around them. He is also aware of the processes that shape his own narrative, something he communicates to the reader through his annotating commentary about the pitfalls of journalism and "MFA creative writing techniques," for example. The narrator also makes metafictional gestures about the narrative's place in the tradition of Anglo-Indian writing, which includes Rushdie, Ghosh, and Naipaul. Written as a mystery, the novel's unnamed narrator—a Pakistani-born academic who teaches literature at the university in Århus—regularly comments on the various genres of writing and the kinds of meanings they produce and withhold. Leery of the flourishes and clichés of "university MFA creative writing," and equally of the sensationalism and hyperbole of mainstream news journalism as he sees it, the narrator tasks himself with chronologically piecing together the events that led up to the "Islamic axe plot" in what he sees as an impartial and clear-eyed way. It is in the unraveling of this "Islamic axe plot"—a plot to kill the cartoonist of irreverent and insulting caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad (no doubt a reference to the Jyllands-Posten images published in 2005)—that the novel's intervention in critical conversations about academe is laid bare.

Broadly speaking, How to Fight Islamist Terror is concerned with alterity in academic spaces and institutions. In this capacity it is a distant relative of novels like Susan Choi's The Foreign Student (1998) and Ishmael Reed's Japanese by Spring (1993). And while it engages race, immigration, gender, and other categories of difference, its principal contribution to its readers' understanding of alterity and marginality in academe lies elsewhere. Khair's novel probes what it represents as the default secular underpinning of humanistic academia and how secularism shapes a scholar's beliefs and commitments. While How to Fight Islamist Terror renders differing manifestations and intensities of secularism, it largely leaves the reader with the conclusion that faith communities and the sacred have little legitimacy as vehicles of meaning-making and knowledge production as far as academics are concerned. This is not to say that the narrative endorses religion and religious worldviews as necessarily desirable or necessarily "thick" and considered in their explication of historical conditions. Nor does the novel suggest that secularism is flawed, or that it is some inert and monolithic ideological formation. Rather, Khair's novel proffers to show how secularism has produced certain patterned intellectual and political dispositions and how these dispositions act in particularly strong—and sometimes harmful—ways on Muslim or nominally Muslim academics who live in the post-9/11 West.

The narrator's account yields a generous amount of narrative space to his two roommates—Ravi, a Hindu Indian doctoral...