Islamophobia and the Novel by Peter Morey

Author:Peter Morey
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Columbia University Press

The dubious conduct of the war on terror is also the backdrop for two post-9/11 novels by the former Baltimore Sun war reporter turned novelist Dan Fesperman, a writer whose work also invites comparison with Le Carré’s and Greene’s. His book The Prisoner of Guantánamo (2006), in addition to being a taut thriller, is an exposé of the position of internees at America’s most famous offshore penitentiary and a meditation on types of imprisonment and the double dealing of vested interests.23 However, here I wish to focus on his earlier novel The Warlord’s Son (2004), which once again explores the notion of “sides” and in which characters cross borders both geographical and cultural, learning more about themselves and the realities of their position in the process.

Indeed, borders became somewhat porous in political terms as the interventionist policies adopted by the West in face of the Kosovo crisis of the late 1990s were extended after 2001. In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in 1999, Secretary-General Kofi Annan identified a shift in the concept of sovereignty from the national to the individual. As Sungur Sarvan points out, it followed that “where a state violates human rights, the ‘international community’ has the ‘right to intervene,’ militarily if need be, in the internal affairs of that state.”24 This definition inaugurated the notion of “cross-border rights,” those rights that can be “defended” by an outside force. It was a short step from this notion to the policy of “regime change” pursued by the Bush administration in the first years of the twenty-first century. This sea change in foreign relations was cemented in 2005 by the United Nations’ adoption of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, which boldly declares that “sovereignty no longer exclusively protects States from foreign interference”25 and that states may be seen to forfeit their sovereignty if they fail adequately to protect their populations from human rights violations.

The Bush government’s first intervention was the less globally controversial invasion of the dysfunctional state of Afghanistan in November 2001 in response to the 9/11 attacks. In its wake, a posse of press and media scrambled for the best positions from which to report back on the progress of the campaign and for the best stories. In The Warlord’s Son, burned-out war reporter Stanford J. Kelly—known as Skelly—is sent on one last assignment to the Pakistan–Afghanistan border by the editor of his provincial midwestern newspaper to cover the movement of troops into Afghanistan in the early days of the invasion. Along with his local fixer, Najeeb, the eponymous warlord’s son, Skelly eventually hooks up with an advanced guard of local militia going over the border, led by one of several tribal chiefs ambitious to stake their claim in the new Afghanistan that will emerge once the Taliban has been dislodged. At the same time, in a subplot, Najeeb’s secret girlfriend, Daliya Qadeer, daughter of a government minister, must escape from imprisonment by her disapproving family and follow Najeeb across the border, too, undertaking a number of transgressions of her own in the process.

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