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

“If I were her, Ravi, I would tell you to go to hell.”

“If only she would, yaar. If only she would. But no, she won’t. She will hear me out; she’ll agree to what I suggest. Farewell, last drink together, let’s give it another try. She’ll agree to any of it in the same even tone. There will be no jarring note from her: not even a go fuck yourself, Ravi!”

What could I have said to that? I returned to framing my questions. Ravi meditated a bit longer on his mobile, turning it around and around. Then he picked up a book of literary criticism and was soon chuckling over it—“This chap makes such a virtue of stating the obvious,” he remarked. But he kept the mobile within reach.

Then, of course, it happened and I, for one, forgot all about Lena for the next few days. Ravi did not. He could not. But even he soon had other things to worry about. When we had weathered the storm, Ravi did not talk about Lena again to me and probably, given where he is now, to anyone else.

What happened? Well, you can guess. It was front-page news in Denmark. It was reported elsewhere too. But we hardly paid it any attention the morning when it was reported.

Karim Bhai had already left for work. A copy of Jyllands Posten —despite all our efforts, Karim Bhai continued to subscribe to this rather provincial paper because he claimed, with some justification, that other national dailies only wrote about Copenhagen—was still lying on the doormat. Karim had obviously left too early to read the paper.

I picked it up and took it to the kitchen. The coffee machine set off its usual infernal racket, which woke up Ravi. He walked in, his sleeping robe loosely tied, rubbing his eyes.

“If this blasted machine did not belong to Karim Bhai,” he said, “I would love to use it for target practice.”

I still hadn’t read the newspaper, which lay on the kitchen table. Ravi sat down and picked it up. Despite his love for cooking, Ravi almost never made breakfast. Actually, though he was not aware of it, he expected coffee to be made and handed to him. I think it was one of those remnants of his past as the only child of rich and famous parents. I wondered what Lena used to make of it. I suspected Danish women would dislike something like that, though I never pointed it out to Ravi: he was a man who strove so much to be what he thought he should be, a man who pushed himself so much, that I thought he was entitled to some habits of relic comfort.

When I handed Ravi his mug of coffee, he was engrossed in the paper. I went to the oven to put in some buns. “Have you read the paper?” he asked.

When I replied in the negative, he laughed and tossed it to me.

“You should read it,” he said. “Your brethren have been bothering the blondes again.”

On the front page, there was a news item about a Somali man who had assaulted one of the Danish artists who had drawn the controversial Mohammad cartoons a few years back. There was some speculation about the man being part of an Al Qaeda “cell.”

This, as we pieced it together, is how it really happened.

It was a few days before Christmas, one of those miserable November days that stretch into February. The little snow on the ground was muddy and sad-looking. A few teenage girls suffered icicle legs in thin stockings for the sake of fashion or boyfriend, but people mostly went about wrapped in jackets and overcoats that had already been beaten out of shape by the winter. The sky had dropped by a few meters, and the clouds reflected the muddy, grimy whiteness of the snow on the ground.

Early morning on a Saturday like this, a Somali man went into a supermarket. It had just opened. The girl at the counter described him as dressed in a weather-beaten overcoat, with layers of woolens underneath. It made him look big and intimidating, though actually he was rather an emaciated, nervous-looking man. He was wearing thick mittens too, and had wrapped his head in a long muffler. He looked distracted, the girl said. He bought a garden axe and a kitchen knife. Later, in another interview, the girl corrected herself and said that he looked “very intense.”

From the supermarket, the Somali man walked some blocks to the house of Bent Hansen, retired cartoonist. He stopped once on the way, and sat down on a bench. He was observed by joggers and an old lady retrieving the doings of her poodle: he was trying to sharpen the axe and the knife by rubbing them against each other. It had frightened the old lady away: she had not managed to scoop all her poodle’s doings into one of those small plastic bags that she always carried around. It was the first time she had ever broken a law, she told the press at every opportunity.

This sharpening of the weapons of assault was widely discussed in the media, especially on TV. I remember one such discussion. First (male) panelist: It proves that he had intended to murder Herr Hansen. Why else should he sharpen the weapons? Second (male) panelist: It definitely indicates a degree of premeditation. Third (male) panelist: But does one need to sharpen a knife or an axe in order to kill a man? I mean, it is not as if flesh is that resistant or… Hostess (interrupting): Brrr, that’s gory… (and turning to the “expert on terrorism”): What would you say, colonel? Expert (male) on terrorism: There is a chance that the accused was specifically influenced by the Taliban brand of Islamism. In all known cases of Islamist assault, axes as well as ceremonial beheadings have been employed by Taliban-influenced militants four times more often than by other jihadist groups…

By and large, media experts agreed that the sharpening of weapons on a street-side bench was an act of premeditation and suggested devious planning. The fact that the Somali left his mittens on the bench also indicated (it was widely noted) that he wanted to retain full use of his hands.

It was not even ten in the morning when the Somali arrived at the house of Mr. Hansen.

Mr. Hansen, a sprightly sixty-nine-year-old man, lived with his wife, who was almost stone deaf and refused to use hearing aids at home. That morning, though, they were babysitting their granddaughters, two angelic children of seven and nine, as the media photos attest. Or Mr. Hansen was, as Mrs. Hansen had a migraine and was still in bed. The children had insisted on watching an American cartoon and Mr. Hansen had allowed them to do so. The TV was on a bit too loud, but Mr. Hansen did not mind. Tom was chasing Jerry around the house. It kept the girls glued to the screen, which is how Mr. Hansen wanted them to be for another hour or so, after which he planned to take them for a walk in the nearby park. He was in the kitchen fixing a few sandwiches for the park trip when someone rang the bell. Mr. Hansen let it ring a few times as he wrapped the sandwiches in silver foil. But then the person started hammering on the door, and Mr. Hansen could no longer ignore it. He lumbered across the sitting room and past the TV set—where Jerry, having imbibed a potion that he believed gave him superhuman strength, was now chasing Tom around the house—and, absentmindedly carrying a sandwich wrapped in silver foil, went to answer the loud, uncivilized knocking.

When Mr. Hansen opened the door, he realized that the man—an African or Arab, as he told the press in the initial interviews—had not been knocking on the door. He had been trying to break it down with an axe. The axe was still stuck to the door. It had been torn out of the man’s hand when Mr. Hansen had opened the door.

The man lunged for the axe handle, shouting something in a language that Mr. Hansen and all his neighbors, some of whom were now peering out of windows, could not understand. But Mr. Hansen knew what it was all about. He heard the word “Mohammad” repeated again and again. He felt the spittle on his face. He had been told what to do in such circumstances. He stayed calm and ran into the bathroom to his left. He closed and locked the door. The bathroom had been reinforced by anti-terror experts: it even had a direct line to the police department. Mr. Hansen called the line as the man—identified as the Somali who had sharpened an axe and a knife on a park bench—started trying to hack down the bathroom door, shouting English words like “revenge” and “honor” along with larger and possibly more complex constructions in some gobbledygook language.