Jihadi Jane by Tabish Khair

Evil, I am certain now, arises whenever a person believes that only what he considers purely good has the right to exist…Evil is a precondition to goodness. Goodness reveals itself only in the capacity to tolerate the pettiness and dullness of evil. Goodness has to live with the possibility of evil, not eradicate it. As long as it does so, the evil that confronts goodness stays petty, dull, limited, essentially unimportant. But when goodness wants to become pure and alone, that is when it turns evil, truly evil; not the grubby evil it has to tolerate in order to be goodness, but Evil itself.

This is probably one part of the book that I will always remember. Why? Because it made me think. And that’s what books are supposed to do, not tell you things, but to make you think. 

Jihadi Jane by Tabish Khair

Jihadi Jane by Tabish Khair is amongst the books that I don’t know if I ever will be able to write fully about. I know I am doing it right now, but can I tell you the story? No. Can I tell you about the characters? No. Can I tell you what to expect? Yes. Thinking. Hell a lot of thinking.

As Liz Jensen said about this book, it is a young British woman’s soul-devouring love affair with Islamic state. Tabish Khair has written the story in the form of a narration by Jamilla, another young British woman who is friends with Ameena, the one Liz Jansen was talking about. Throughout the book, Jamilla wonders what goes on in the mind of Ameena, who, although a muslim, had simply started practicing Islam after a lot of pursuation from Jamilla, and then did so to an extent that Jamilla could no longer recognize her.

The story takes the readers through a few years of Jamilla and Ameena’s lives and their interpretations of the same religion, Islam. The story is so horrifying, beautiful and brutally honest at times (not just about Islamic radicalization) but about goodness, evil, the real message of a religion, any religion actually (including Islam) and the ways humans alter the meaning, the purpose and the teachings of the religion to meet their own ends.

My review for this book is no review, it is more of a collection of my unstructured thoughts that I have had while reading and even hours after finishing this book. The book revoles around the term Jihad. Yes, Jihad. But not the real one, not the one that is jihad, but the jihad that has been modified and reshaped to meet the needs of terrorist organizations who couldn’t care less about a religion or a God. The book also focuses on another issue, Islam and the Islam of people like Hejjiye and Hassan. The Islam that teaches to care for all living beings, the Islam that teaches patience and compassion and kindness, and the Islam of modern-day jihadis who kill and torture other human beings, all in the name of the religion that condemns everything they do. The Islam of the Qur’an and the Islam of the Town.

I am not sure I can describe the story any better than this and I am not sure people would understand it by reading this either. What I am sure about, though, is that once you pick this book up, you don’t regret it. And if you’re anything like me, you won’t even want to put it down.

I’ll put this book in the ‘Can’t wait for the book to end but don’t want it to end’ category, which means I do not consider myself as a person who can rate it. So, no stars, and all the stars.