Khalil

Khalil takes the reader on a journey into understanding religious radicalization and the path out of it, documenting a young man's fears and desires and his search for meaning in a world where few human lives are attributed with it. I want everyone to read this book, to try to understand what happens when religion is used for violence and violence becomes the only way someone can achieve recognition or--as many feel--can achieve something important. Khalil is every boy raised by and with violence and in poverty and without education, every young man who finds solace in a form of belief that includes the tenet that to act for the religion equals love from that religion's god, and, perhaps more importantly, that god's living representatives.

This is the first book I've read by Yasmina Khadra, the pen name of former Algerian military officer Mohammed Moulessehoul, and flipping through some of the reviews of his previous books, it seems like the premise of Khalil is familiar ground for him: a directionless youth seduced by Islamic fundamentalists and the rippling damage wrought by extremist violence, braided with meditations on alienation, belonging, and the ability to find and hold onto joy in daily life.

Khalil, the narrator, pulls no punches and launches into his story immediately: in the first sentence he lets the reader know that he's a suicide bomber who, together with three other suicide bombers, are heading to the Stade de France. For some reason, Khalil's bomb vest doesn't go off, and the story that follows places Khalil back in Brussels among his family, friends, and terrorist cell organizers. The story shifts between Khalil's frantic actions to hide himself, figure out what happened, make money, and regain a sense of control, and his reflections on his largely estranged family, his early sense of the limitations placed on him as a blasé student, the alienation he felt as the child of Moroccan immigrants living in Molenbeek, a district of Brussels, and the respect and belonging he found in the mosque that radicalized him.

While the story has elements of a thriller, including escalating stakes and tragedies for Khalil, the narration lends the story a more contemplative feel, even as heart-pounding developments envelope Khalil and push him towards another act of terrorism. Khalil's reflections on his life and his community recall Camus's The Stranger, but in many ways, I found these reflections somewhat simplistic (was his childhood friend Rayan's success solely down to Rayan's involved mother?). In some ways, Khadra is trying to answer the questions of what makes someone susceptible to radicalization and what might pull them back from extremism, which are such timely, critical questions for the moment in both Europe and the U.S., and while I picked up the book knowing the astonishing statistic that, per capita, more Belgians have gone to Syria to fight for ISIS than any other country, I don't think the book provided adequate context for that figure - that is, Khalil could have been from the banlieues of Paris or the East End of London, and his story would have been largely the same.

Khadra tells a provocative story and invites his readers to spend time with a narrator difficult to empathize with, and even if he isn't entirely successful in rendering Khalil and his milieu, it is an unusual story and one that I'm glad to have read.