Well, that worked for me. When I saw Tabish Khair’s novel on the shelf at Wollongong Library I just had to borrow it!

Part shaggy dog story, part love stories, part wonderful rendition of cross-cultural relations, part sharp insights into Pakistan/Indian relations, Muslim/Muslim relations… And often very funny. Loved it, and learned from it – not least about Denmark, where it is set and where Khair is a professor in the Department of English, University of Aarhus.

Tabish Khair

Arifa Akbar writes:

Who wouldn’t be struck by a title like this, with its mix of fundamentalism and sniggering sexual reference? Surely, it can only lead to all-title-and-no-trousers disappointment. No, not at all. In fact, the title is nowhere near as irreverent, intelligent, and explosive as the slowly detonated bomb of a story inside.

The three central characters are familiar-enough though too individualised to be clichéd. Two are Asian lads behaving badly: progressive; promiscuous (one middle-class Muslim, one super-privileged, wannabe Muslim); both players. They move in with an unreconstituted Muslim who drives a taxi and takes the Koran at its divine word. The three are  united, despite these differences, as outsiders living in Denmark (where the award-winning author, Tabish Khair, teaches), all equally subject to the roiling political debate on immigration. Breivik’s attack has  happened in Norway, and the knee-jerk assumption that it was the Islamists is still sending ripples of suspicion across Scandinavia…

What it dramatises is how Muslims are  judged, and more interestingly, how one kind of Muslim judges another, and how this judgement can be deeply complex, and condemnatory. It may only be mid-February but I suspect this will be among my most memorable reads of 2014.

See also The New Republic:

Tabish Khair’s new novel, How To Fight Islamist Terror From the Missionary Position, is the best short attempt to capture some of these realities and tensions that I have yet read. At less than 200 pages, Khair pulls off a brisk, bitingly funny narrative that manages to make some astute points about both Islamic extremism and the Western penchant for stereotyping without drawing anything like a false equivalence. And for a book so concise and witty, it is also surprisingly textured.

And The Guardian:

Fighting Islamist terror is not the book’s focus and, although both main characters have lively libidos, sex is not a particular concern either. In a Danish setting that seems to reflect Khair’s own role as a lecturer at Aarhus University, friends from the Indian subcontinent, one Indian, one Pakistani, move into the flat of an older Muslim, Karim. In contrast to the two young men, Karim is devout and, it seems, narrow-minded, the very definition of a bigot. This is a story of multicultural Denmark, of liberal sensibilities rubbing up against fundamentalism, of brilliant post-colonial minds trying to shine in the cool, grey light of Scandinavia. There’s an echo of The Great Gatsby in the first-person narrative through which one of the young men, never named, admires, scrutinises and ultimately weighs up his congenial and fascinating friend Ravi. Quirkily humorous, this novel challenges assumptions about Muslims.