ON BEING A FUNDY

Nussaibah Younis (Merton, 2004, History and English) meets me at a café overlooking Newington Green in North London, not a stone’s throw from a recently controversial new statue of early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97). It seems broadly appropriate, and while Nussaibah’s new novel Fundamentally unfolds mostly in Iraq, she is herself from this bit of London.

Sipping a Coke, Nussaibah says she wrote the novel, which has been widely heralded following a lively auction for the publishing rights, in one year, 2023. But it is set in 2017, safely ahead of COVID upending the world.

She has taken extensive experience of academia, field work in Iraq, and a London upbringing as a strictly educated Muslim with Iraqi and Pakistani parentage, to craft a brilliantly original work of fiction in which the protagonist, a young academic called Nadia, drops into Iraq to head a new deradicalisation unit for the UN, and ends up befriending a fellow Londoner and former ISIS bride called Sara.

It's definitely not a roman à clef but Nussa is the first to admit that there is plenty of first-hand experience in the work. The defining genre is uproarious humour of the sort we associate with classic British satire – from Monty Python to Yes Minister.

Nadia helps Sara escape a camp for former ISIS brides and reunites her with her child, but a rattling narrative fires off hilarity and wrecking balls in all directions so that not much is left standing at the end. It’s sassy, funny, scandalous, raunchy and very sweary. It tears off the niqab and renders Muslim women relatable human beings.

One institution reduced to rubble is the British government; another is the UN; a third is political correctness particularly where it collides with itself around themes of post-colonial theory and sexuality, diversity and equality.

It kicks off with the sort of pratfall scenario that leads me to mention Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim, Nussa nodding in recognition.

Newly arrived at the dusty but secure UN compound in Iraq, Nadia bravely tries to impress the world-weary colleagues she is there to supposedly lead:

‘‘I’m Nadia Amin,’ I said in my stiffest voice. ‘I’m a lecturer in criminology at UCL and I’ve taken a sabbatical to do this job. I was headhunted actually, to lead the deradicalisation programme [at the UN in Baghdad, Iraq].’’

As the reader, you already know that this is going to go off a cliff. There is a delicious sense of anticipation and pace.

In one sense that’s the book: inexperienced young academic gets chewed up by a shark-infested UN, surrounded by corrupt elites including anyone at an embassy. But – and it’s a real but – said protagonist prevails by ditching it all and doing something outrageous, driven by a perceptible moral conviction despite broader nihilistic mood music.

Nussa says she read constantly during multiple postings to Iraq over a decade.

‘Yes Minister, Yes Prime Minister, W1A, In the Thick of It, The Loop, Monty Python. I asked myself: where is the Evelyn Waugh Scoop (1938) equivalent voice for this subject, for rescuing Isis brides? It didn’t exist so that’s what I set out to do here.’

There’s an exquisitely mad scene in the earlier reaches of the novel when Nadia is corrected by a British Embassy official for referring to the ISIS brides as ‘women’.

‘‘Peoples socialised as women,’ she corrected me.”

Nadia replies that they’re all ‘cisgendered, straight and Muslim. Otherwise, they’d have already been beheaded.’

To which the official blathers on, ‘I’m afraid your approach does not meet the strictures of our inclusion policy…’

Then, Nadia comes back into her first-person reflection, a dialogue with herself but also with the reader:

‘Jesus Christ on the rainbow flag, was I being punk’d? It’d be difficult to find anyone in the world more marginalised, more despised, than an ISIS widow. But, even if they were innocent, even if they were the victims of exploitation, we couldn’t support them unless we found a secret pansexual lurking in one of the tents? The logic of HMG’s civil service, that’s the true harbinger of Britain’s decline.’

I suggest that I will write about Fundamentally as post-woke, because it kicks over all the careful language of political correctness, not because it isn’t desirable in some narrow, theoretical sense but because it crumbles in the face of reality.

Nussa walks her audience down a serrated knife-edge of cross-cultural collison, and her’s is a unique voice. By parentage half-Iraqi, half-Pakistani, a Londoner, a Briton. Spectacularly awkward for the Post-Colonialist crowd. Further complications include a residual respect for religion. In real life she studied the Muslim religion with Anwar al-Awlaki who later joined Al-Qaeda, so she knows how radicalisation works in practice.

The fact that you can’t box anything in is what drives the whole enterprise here, and Younis knows it. Sara is likable; she’s lovable through Nadia. Both are flawed. Life in general cannot be suppressed. People are resilient irrespective of corrupt power structures or civil wars. Western-sponsored deradicalisation programmes are mostly deluded.

The content has a strong echo in light of the recent Southport killings in the UK, and anguish over the British anti-radicalisation initiative called Prevent.

Younis has the outline of an answer and it does not involve trying to make radically motivated people believe something else.

‘What we’ve learned is that trying to teach a different theology is likely to backfire; bringing these individuals back to their families is far more likely to bring them away from violent intent…’

And the plot unfolds accordingly, delightfully but edgily told as the emerging friendship between Nadia and Sara, both of whom are abroad to escape a rupture in their personal lives back in Britain.

‘There is this incredible hypocrisy in how we actually help women. It’s myopic and I think disgraceful.’

Nussaibah continues, ‘put a headscarf on a girl and she ceases to be human. We’re fixated on the wrong point. This is a human being, from Bethnal Green, who was attracted to ISIS at the moment when Assad became genocidal. If a young white man goes to Ukraine to pick up arms we say he’s a hero. Shamima Begum is instead treated like an exotic fetish by the tabloids.’

Aside from the novel, which I’m sure will be a roaring success, where exactly is Iraq today? I mention the book How Britain Broke the World by Arthur Snell (Magdalen, 1994) – and how Iraq is depicted there as being a failed state after the Bush-Blair invasion in 2003.

But Younis says that life under Saddam was absolutely grim and that ‘it’s much better there now than it was then.’ In fact this is an early theme of the novel. When Nadia first arrives in Baghdad she fully expects it to be a smoking, ex-warfare wasteland and is confounded to find brand new SUVs, street weddings and the smell of delicious streetfood.

She says her perspective on the Western invasion has changed over two decades, noting how at the time in 2003 she was right out there on the London streets, protesting the Western invasion.

‘I’m a humanitarian. I value lives saved. It’s a practical subject. If genocide starts to take place intervention is merited.’

She is alluding to the fact that when Bashar al-Assad deployed the nerve agent sarin against civilians in 2013 (Aleppo, later Ghouta on a much larger scale killing as many as 1,400), the west blinked when they could have done something.

She is also saying that how that all played out through ISIS propaganda abroad is largely missed in the UK, never mind the tabloid treatment of various ISIS brides – in other words, that an alienated teenager in East London might in 2013-15 have been picked up by the idealism of fighting Assad, just as others might now get praised for helping Ukraine against Putin.

Not everything is necessarily a malign legacy of colonialism, she says.

‘You couldn’t have written this,’ she says to me.

Her’s is a unique voice. She took a huge risk to write the novel but it got picked up immediately by A.M. Heath agent Florence Rees, who then managed an auction process that turned into an eight-way fight for the rights, now extending to TV dramatization. We’re already looking forward to the sequel. For now, Fundamentally is published on February 25, 2025.