Fundamentally - Hardcover

Younis, Nussaibah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593851382 ISBN 13: 9780593851388

Verlag: Tiny Reparations Books, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A wickedly funny and audacious debut novel following a heartbroken academic as she lands in Iraq to lead a United Nation backed deradicalization program created to reform ISIS brides.

When Dr. Nadia Amin, a long-suffering academic, publishes an article on the possibility of rehabilitating ISIS brides she lands a coveted lectureship, and is freed from the misery of adjuncting. The United Nations also comes calling, offering the opportunity to lead a deradicalization program for the ISIS affiliated women held in Iraqi refugee camps. Looking for a way out of London after a painful, unexpected breakup Nadia leaps at the chance.

In Iraq Nadia quickly realizes she’s in over her head. Her direct reports are hostile and unenthused to be taking orders from an obvious UN novice, and the murmurs of deradicalization being inherently unethical and possibly illegal threaten to end Nadia’s UN career before it even begins.

Frustrated by her situation and the unrelenting heat, Nadia decides to visit her camp with her sullen team comprised of goody-two-shoes Sherri who never passes up an opportunity to remind Nadia of her objections; and Pierre, a snippy Frenchman who has no qualms perpetually scrolling through Grindr.

At the camp, a clumsy introductory session with the ISIS women is where Nadia meets Sara, whose accent gives her away as a fellow East Londoner. From their first interaction Nadia feels inexplicably drawn to the rude girl in the diamante headscarf. She leaves the camp determined to get Sara home.

But the system Nadia is trapped in is a quagmire of inaction and corruption. One accomplishment barely makes a dent in Nadia’s ultimate goal of freeing Sara…and the other women too, of course. And so, Nadia makes an impossible decision leading to ramifications she could have never imagined.

A triumph of dark humor, FUNDAMENTALLY asks bold questions—who can tell someone what to believe? And how does one save someone who doesn’t want to be saved?

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dr Nussaibah Younis is a peacebuilding practitioner and a globally recognized expert on contemporary Iraq. She has a PhD in International Affairs from the University of Durham, UK, and a BA in Modern History and English from the University of Oxford. Dr Younis was a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington DC, where she directed the Task Force on the Future of Iraq and offered strategic advice to US government agencies on Iraq policy. Dr Younis has published op-eds in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian and provided on-air commentary for the BBC and Al-Jazeera. She was born in the UK to an Iraqi father and a Pakistani mother, and currently lives in London.

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1

Five Months Earlier

It's not like I was expecting Stalingrad, but Baghdad took the piss. Arriving for the first time, tucked into a UN car, I watched as the city lights refracted through the bulletproof glass. Floodlights hovered over a pickup football game, square lamps up-lit the National Museum, fairy lights dripped down palm trees beside the Tigris River. Why was it so . . . nice? What happened to the rolling blackouts? The electrical transmission network supposedly ravaged by war? Hadn't I donated to help Iraqi women giving birth in cowsheds lit by the flame of a single candle?

Car after car parked along the river's banks; sparkling Audis and BMWs among older Toyotas and Hyundais. I'd thought I was a high roller, leaving London halfway through a monthly Travelcard. Young men unloaded foldout chairs, shisha pipes, and portable barbecues, setting up by the water's edge. I could almost smell the marinated baby chickens, the flattened carp smoldering over charcoal, but the driver stopped me from rolling the window down.

"Security," he said, tilting his head toward rooftops empty of snipers.

I spotted a huddle of teenagers watching TikTok, trying to imitate a dance, before pushing each other over, their laughter subsumed by the honking traffic. Rosy and I used to dance like that.

A convoy of cars started beeping frantically, and my back tensed up, anticipating a critical incident ahead. Then I saw white ribbon stretched over the hood of a Mercedes, a bride stepping out, her lace dress draped over marble steps as she entered a five-star hotel. Was this fucking Midnight in Paris? I'd signed up for cluster munitions, not glitter bombs. I spluttered with the indignity of it.

"Everything OK, ma'am?" The African driver looked over his shoulder. What had brought him here? A carefully weighed decision, no doubt. Not juvenile heartbreak, like me.

"I'm fine, thanks. You can call me Nadia." I deserved to be called a lot of things, but ma'am wasn't one of them.

"Ah, it's like Nadia Buari, big actress in Ghana." He nodded at me with approval. "And why you came to Baghdad, Nadia?"

"Oh, I'm here for a job. I'm creating a deradicalization program for ISIS brides. Yeah . . . don't ask."

The driver raised his eyebrows but stayed silent. I checked my phone, hoping for a message from Rosy conveying immense pain at having me ripped from her life. But my SIM card, flabbergasted at having been brought to Iraq, had malfunctioned.

Returning to the window, I strained my eyes, searching for burned-out cars and bullet holes, something to undermine this tableau of festivity, anything to force Rosy into irrelevance. But in the falling darkness, the jollity glowed only brighter.

We entered the Green Zone, a fortified district where international organizations and government agencies hid from the population they claimed to serve. My new home.

My driver deposited me in the car park of the UN compound. He stepped out of the car and lit a cigarette, staring hard at my chest while I heaved my suitcase out of the trunk. Shouldn't misogyny have an equal and opposite chivalric force?

"Over there." He pointed toward a security cabin, his burning red tobacco dancing against the darkness.

I dragged my suitcase over the ground, the evening breeze a warm relief after the intense air-conditioning in the car. A generator rumbled on the far side of the car park, the smell of diesel repelling insects through the air, the stars obscured by a thin gray smog that hung between the city lights and the night sky.

I entered the security cabin, caught my foot on the lip of the doorway, and fell inside. It usually took more than ten seconds to humiliate myself at a new job, but here I was, already achieving a personal best.

A lean Iraqi man in a blue uniform stepped away from his prayer mat and crouched beside me. "You OK, Doctor?"

I was comforted by his use of my title; status gives you scope to absorb minor failures. I hoisted myself up.

"I'm Farris," he said, his Iraqi accent strongly Americanized. He picked up my suitcase and put it on a trestle table that bisected the room. "You must be Dr. Nadia. You're very welcome here."

I watched in horror as he snapped on latex gloves and unzipped my suitcase.

"Real sorry I have to do this," he said, shaking his head. "It's just protocol."

He used his hand condoms to remove every item in turn. A copy of Cosmopolitan, the headline screaming: "Everything You NEED to Know about Rimming!" Scores of enormous black underpants interspersed with a few sexy transparent ones. A lilac bullet vibrator, which he unscrewed until a AAA battery shot out. A backup pack of AAA batteries. I pulled out my nonfunctioning phone and pretended to text, my ears throbbing with shame.

My ears were familiar with the feeling. When I was a teenager, my mum found a Just Seventeen magazine hidden in a Quranic exegesis textbook in my bedroom. She lay in wait as I returned from school.

"This is disgusting, Nadia." She waved the naked torso of Pacey from Dawson's Creek in my face. "How can you read such filth?"

I don't read it; I look at it while holding an electric toothbrush to my clit.

"It's the other girls at school," I said, inching back toward the door. "I'm only trying to fit in. I don't enjoy it." Evoking the mysterious dangers of peer pressure normally worked on Mum.

"If they jumped off a cliff, would you follow?" she said. It was her favorite retort, but also the most idiotic. I obviously did a risk analysis before deciding which of my friends' behaviors to imitate. Mum was trying to tear up the magazine, but she kept getting the glossy pages tangled in the staples.

"Muslim friends only from now on," she said.

Mum had been a born-again Muslim ever since my father died when I was a toddler. After the magazine incident, she invested heavily in my indoctrination, until I became deeply religious. A total dork, I loved nothing more than planning my revision timetables, and being religious was like having a revision timetable for life, the day of judgment being the final exam. I lived as a paragon of Islamic virtue until I went to university, where relentless intellectual challenges and social seductions thawed my devotion to naught.

"Good to go, Doctor," said Farris, zipping my suitcase back up. "Look forward to hanging sometime."

His prayer mat lay in the corner, an image of the Ka'ba woven into the fabric, but when I looked at his face, it was warm and free of judgment.

He handed me over to a staffer whose white headscarf and blouse produced the combined effect of a shroud-albeit a shroud destined for paradise. It felt strange being around Muslims again, after my godless life in London, and I wondered if they could smell the apostasy on me.

Shroud led me through a grassy outdoor quad, the air fresh against my matted hair, and into a two-story building, where she tapped a key card against a bedroom door. I stepped inside. The room was tiny, which made the furniture look huge. A single bed pushed against the wall, an incongruously ornate wardrobe, a desk covered in blue pen marks, and a flimsy foldout chair.

Shroud held the door open, one foot in, one foot out, and handed me a bundle of items, including a lanyard, a map, and a schedule for tomorrow.

"You have question?" she said.

Dozens of questions collided in my brain, canceling one another out.

"No." She was gone before my mouth completed the "oh."

I stood in the middle of the room, suitcase next to me, its metal handle standing high, ready to be reversed out of this world. What cunty-bollocking madness had possessed me to come here?

I remembered the taste of Peroni on Rosy's tongue, the sweaty jasmine smell she'd leave on my sheets.

I'd thought I...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Tiny Reparations Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593851382
• ISBN 13: 9780593851388
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar