Tabish Khair - How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position

“The Prophet, peace be upon him,” said Karim Bhai, with that irritating glaze in his dark-edged eyes that fellow-Muslims often get when speaking of the founder of the religion, “had only one wife for years: she was about twenty years older than him. He remained faithful to her and he did not marry again until after she died, peace be upon her. In fact, for a long time, she was among the very few who believed in his message. You can say that she believed in the message of Allah before the Holy Prophet did himself, for when the Holy Prophet heard the message for the first time, he thought he was hearing voices. She was the person who convinced him that it was a genuine revelation.”

“Women have a lot to answer for,” I whispered to Ravi in the lobby, who frowned and hushed me. No matter how flippant Ravi was about matters that concerned me, including the religion I was born into, he was always a very polite listener in the case of Karim Bhai.

Karim Bhai was just as polite while listening to Ravi. With me, he showed some signs of impatience, subdued, betrayed only by the eyes flicking to the TV screen or the hands picking up a newspaper while I was talking critically about matters like the Islamization of Pakistan. But with Ravi, Karim would make an effort, focus on his words with his possibly kohled eyes, his forehead wrinkling sometimes in a bid to follow Ravi’s somersaulting conversation.

What was he listening for in Ravi’s case? Those barbs about Western hubris that, though they came from a different source, soothed the Islamist in Karim? Or was he interested in Ravi as a person who could be converted to Karim’s cause, whatever that was? Or, and this polar opposite was possible too, was he observing Ravi as one would observe an alien from outer space?

Or was it something simpler: Karim’s respect for someone who was from another culture, or class?

In any case, Karim would listen carefully to Ravi’s conversation, and Ravi, in his turn, would offer his opinions in uncharacteristically modulated and less acerbic terms. For instance, he would not dismiss the existence of God but simply mention the fact that it did not mesh with the evidence of human suffering. At which Karim would shake his head and gently disagree, trotting out all the arguments that the believing have used for centuries to avoid being faced with their loneliness in the universe.

The debate would continue, gently, in the kitchen. I would retire to my room to read or take a nap. I did not really know who was trying to convert whom, and I did not care. I had given up on God a long time back; if God had existed, I am sure he would have reciprocated in kind.

We were on our way to a party thrown by one of Ravi’s PhD colleagues. I knew the person only vaguely, but he had invited me and Ravi had insisted on me coming along: his argument was that he would feel more comfortable going there with Lena and me, than with Lena alone. Both of them were remarkably careful about their relationship in public: revealing it fully only in contexts where, they felt, it would not be devalued into something else, something more mundane, something like the usual academic affair between two attractive PhD students.

We met Lena for a drink in a café in town, before heading for the party. She was wearing a one-shoulder turquoise chiffon evening dress that brought out her intensely green eyes, her golden hair tied into one of those intricate knots that are again coming back into vogue. When I had seen them together the first time, I had been struck by how similar they were despite their differences. This time, I was struck by how different they were despite their similarities. Ravi was consciously unguarded, in behavior, opinion and dress; his speech was full of gaps and curlicues; his shirt was never too ironed, his hair always a bit awry. Lena was controlled and guarded: every bit of dress and hair in place, every word and gesture so carefully enunciated or performed that she seemed to be on stage all the time. It needed someone with Ravi’s casual and unassuming confidence to fall in love with her, as he claimed to have fallen in love: the full glass and not the usual half glasses that we usually subsist on. Many other men would have found her frightening and cold, for Lena was a woman who had either become her own mask or never let that mask down in public. Perhaps, I thought, she did for Ravi. Perhaps that was what knitted them together, for at that point there was no doubt in my mind that this was not just a casual spring fling for either of them.

After Ravi had stopped to buy a good bottle of wine and some Belgian beers—he never trusted the alcohol served in Danish parties—we headed for his colleague’s flat. It was a one-bedroom affair, with a large sitting-room-cum-kitchen. The kitchen had been arranged to resemble a bar from one side, with a half wall that had bar stools ranged against it. It was the kind of flat one would expect a bachelor to have.

And it was already crowded. Many of Ravi’s colleagues were there and another dozen people or so, half of whom I knew or recognized from the university. All the chairs, stools and sofas were occupied; some people were ensconced on the bed in the bedroom. The kitchen tables were lined with bottles, glasses and bowls of chips; two pizzas were in the oven and the chili con carne and rice almost ready. There wasn’t going to be anything fancier: the decades when parties thrown by bachelors had to be redeemed from the shadow of Oedipal heterosexuality by offerings of a dozen intricate cuisines were over. Blokishness reigned in Denmark and heterosexual men were again free to be, in Ravi-speak, the uncouth pigs they naturally were.

But this blokishness did not encompass a carte blanche to smoke in the flat: Cancer was bigger than either Mars or Venus. There was a balcony attached to the bedroom. It was small and could contain only four or five people, standing, at a time. That was where smokers had to go to light up. It was seldom crowded, though: most of the people in the party were professional academics in their thirties and forties and their habits, like their books, accorded with the times.

Ravi headed for the balcony after a quick round of hellos, as he was offered a “bong” by someone he knew who spoke with an Australian accent. Bong, I assumed, was a kind of hash, something Ravi indulged in at parties. Lena fell in with people she knew, listening with the sort of expression of delighted interest that she brought into any conversation and that, undoubtedly, made many men feel more intelligent than they were. It was a talent she was not even fully aware of. Perhaps she saw it as courtesy or kindness.

An hour later, when the rice and the chili con carne had been ladled out and I was trying my best to balance my plate on my knees, sip from my glass, which was jostling for space with seven other glasses of different shapes on a small side table, and converse with migrating acquaintances, Ravi wended his way out of the bedroom, dodging a dozen pair of hands busy expressing ideas or conveying food.

“There he is,” he said on catching sight of me, “I told you he is around…”

Behind him there walked a woman in her thirties, almost straw-blonde (though I later discovered that she dyed her hair), a bit short by Danish standards, but with the kind of rounded hips and slightly fleshy calves that I always notice. I knew her. This was the woman I had mentioned to Ravi, the one he called (behind her back, I am sure) Ms. Linen Marx.

I knew why Ravi had dragged her to my section of the party. I had more trouble understanding why Ms. Marx—let us call her that, for there are reasons (which will be revealed in due linear course, as my MFA-girlfriend would have insisted) to keep her name under cover—had allowed Ravi to drag her to me. She had not only shown no interest in me in the past, she had actually conveyed active disinterest on the one occasion when I had tried to break the ice. It had been done politely; it had struck me as genuine disinterest. She had not been bad to me: I was just not the kind of man she found interesting. How had Ravi managed to drag her through this crowd of coagulating con carne and conversations to my corner? I could only attribute it to the fact that women in general, married or not, interested or not, could seldom resist following Ravi around.