Could a book about ISIS brides ever be funny?

In the hands of debut author Nussaibah Younis, the answer is a resounding yes

There aren’t many people who could write a wildly entertaining yet truthful page-turner about a deradicalisation programme for ISIS brides in Iraq. Dr Nussaibah Younis—a peacebuilding practitioner and globally recognised expert on contemporary Iraq—however, is well placed. Her debut novel, Fundamentally (which comes out today in the UK), is a Trojan horse of a novel: a shockingly funny and rollockingly readable caper, which also lends nuance, knowledge and compassion to a hot-button political issue.

Fundamentally’s protagonist is 30-something criminology lecturer, Nadia, who arrives in Iraq to lead a project rehabilitating women affiliated with ISIS, that she quickly realises is a shit show. Half the people she needs to work with—Iraqi diplomats, tribal chiefs, local NGOs—are corrupt; the other half—her colleagues at the UN—are too battle-worn to believe the programme could ever succeed.

Complicating matters further, despite her best attempts to emit ‘professional woman on peace-building mission’ vibes, Nadia arrives in Iraq in emotional freefall: cruelly cast aside by her best friend and lover, Rosy, and alienated from her religious family after renouncing her faith a decade before, Nadia has accepted her mission in the misguided hope that in saving others, she might find herself. What goes down, of course, is almost entirely the opposite to what she imagined. And when ‘Sheikh Jason’ from California is hired to teach the women in the camp a moderate form of Islam (which appears to be more Buddhist than anything else), it becomes something of a farce: by turns devastating, absurd, thought-provoking and vulgar.

This is not the first book to be written about the radicalisation of young people—Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie, The Runaways by Fatima Bhutto, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, all spring to mind—but what Younis does so well is to bring the reader along with Nadia. Because while Nadia might be academically accomplished, she knows about as much about a warzone as we do: she packs the wrong clothes; is violently unwell after over-indulging on kebabs; throws herself into the arms of the camp’s security brawn almost immediately; is embarrassingly idealistic about everything; and gets drunk on tequila and cry-screams at everyone in the camp’s tiki bar. Most importantly, she gets career-ruiningly close to a feisty British teenager in the camp, Sara, who left East London for Iraq aged 15, and with whom she shares an acidic sense of humour.

“The air shifted behind me, and I turned around, coming face to cloth with a niqabi.

‘Your sheikh is a pussy,’ [Sara] said, her niqab moving like a ventriloquist’s dummy. My face swallowed itself into a smile.

‘I know,’ I said, trying to act casual. ‘You should have seen our other options.’

‘How could they have been worse?’ Sara scratched her toe with the bottom of her blue plastic slipper. Her naked toes were the only part of her body I could see apart from her eyes.

‘One was Shia, and the other was basically Osama Bin Laden.’ The room was empty now, except for Jason. He gestured he would meet me in the car, and I waved him away.

‘I vote for Bin Laden,’ she said, without missing a beat.

‘I know. That’s the entire problem, babe.’”

Fundamentally is thrilling to read—it’s bold and unapologetically ambiguous— but I was almost vibrating with questions for the author. Is international aid really this chaotic!? Is everyone actually this corrupt? And is Sara based on Shamima Begum? And so I rung up Younis (Nuss) the week before publication, and asked her some questions, which she was gracious enough to answer below. As ever, do drop me a Comment if you feel so inclined. I love to hear from you!

Nuss hi! I read this book in two gulps, it stunned me and moved me and made me laugh out loud—which is quite the feat, given the subject matter. Why did you want to write it?

I think that the political debate around this issue is very simplistic. A lot of people have an opinion without access to the emotional truth. If you can put yourself in the shoes of a character, it can bring you to a place of empathy. It’s complex; it holds space for you to come to your own conclusions. This is not an easy topic to deal with. What I wanted people to do, through a genuinely fun and entertaining novel, is spend some time needling away at some of the complexities of this issue.

The next obvious question: why was it important that it was (very, very) funny?

I love British satire. I grew up reading and loving Evelyn Waugh and Oscar Wilde and Kingsley Amis. I love that wry, witty take down of an institution that novels like Waugh’s Scoop can do, by having quite a weak protagonist and skewing every individual who is in every position. Working in a war zone is also one of the funniest places you can be. Gallows humour is real! When you work in a really intense environment, a human coping mechanism is to find the light and the joy in the situation, even if that means telling some of the darkest jokes known to mankind. Telling this story without humour would have felt really untrue; the honest truth of living and working in an environment like this is that people find the levity in it. They have to. And in terms of all the jokes—Iraq is the most un-PC place you will ever go!

How did you come up with the character of Sara? She’s very witty, very sharp, a teenager who left East London to join ISIS aged 15, following in the footsteps of her best friend, Jamila. Is she inspired by Shamima Begum?

With a character like Sara, she has agency and a personality. She’s not just a 2D victim, or a 2D terrorist, she is a teenager with an attitude who claps back and who has a fantastic sense of humour and is able to really see the hypocrisies in the UN’s system and poke at Nadia’s weak points. I used to volunteer at a homework club at an East London mosque and I’d hang out with these girls who were very much the same age as Sara. They were so precocious and witty—and also naive and idealistic—and absolutely the kind of girls who could have got swept up in ISIS. Writing Sara’s character, I was thinking about how sharp those girls were.

I was also really delving into myself as a 15-year-old girl, because I grew up very, very devout. I was very politicised—I had a real yearning to protect and save my fellow Muslims who I felt were being oppressed all over the world. I would spend my summers at religious camp and one summer, I was taught by sheikh Anwar al-Awlaki [a Yemeni-American preacher] who ended up joining al-Qaida.

[In a piece for The Guardian published last week, Nuss writes that after meeting the preacher, “I went to university and my capacity for critical thinking grew and matured… But there was another generation of teenage girls who weren’t as lucky as me. The ones who came of age watching massacres of Syrian civilians on YouTube, who were persuaded that by joining IS they could save lives… As I read the academic literature on deradicalisation, I kept imagining my teenage self as an IS bride. What would she say to me now? “You want to brainwash your people to make western war criminals feel safer in their beds?”]

Which is something that happens to Nadia, too.

Nadia’s [experience as a teenager] was really inspired by my experience. And I wanted to have teenage me, meet me as I was today, as an NGO worker. I think I know better, I can be condescending, I can be paternalistic—and I know that if I met myself now, as a 15-year-old, I can imagine all the ways I would fight back and resist, with my dogmatic sense of what’s right.

Teenage Nadia is not so far from teenage Sara; but 30-something Nadia is no longer observant. She does, however, make some bold (some would say insane) choices in an effort to make a difference. Sara calls her “a slag with a saviour complex”.

Nadia is the person who says all the things I wouldn’t dare to say out loud—and all the things I wouldn’t dare to do, as I don’t want to die, or end up in prison!

The equal opportunities skewering is what’s so thrilling about the book: the ISIS brides might be morally ambiguous, but so are plenty of diplomats, NGO worker, the local tribe chiefs (who are mostly just straight-up corrupt.) There’s a particularly funny bit where the only female Iraqi politician in the Cabinet—who Nadia really needs on her side—insists that for “security reasons” they must meet in Lebanon (because she wants to get an all-expenses jolly out of Nadia’s UN budget). And then when Nadia tries to talk to her about rehabilitating some of the women, the politician says, what on earth are they doing in Lebanon, don’t they know she’s very busy and important? She must get home! Nadia is maddened, and Pierre—who has seen it all before—just laughs. How much of this is amped up for novelistic purposes and how much is it fly by the seat of your pants diplomatic chaos and corruption?

Let’s just say, I’ve signed a lot of NDAs. [Laughs.] The characters are composites of people I worked with. There are definitely people in the industry who are nepobaby diplomats [like Pierre] and who understand how to work a system—and sometimes, that’s actually the best way to get things done. I was so idealistic [when Nuss worked there in 2019 and 2020, not affiliated with the UN], I wore my heart on my sleeve, I over invested, and that actually is not helpful. I try and show in the book [through Nadia] that over-identifying with a particular person you are trying to help, can be a projection. As an aid worker, having a hero complex doesn’t serve anyone. The successes in the book? [They] typically come from the most cynical characters.

In your afterword, you note that local women and foreign women would not typically be held in the same camp—foreign jihadi brides tended to be held in Syria, whilst Iraqi women affiliated with ISIS were held in Iraqi camps. But for clarity of storytelling (a sacrifice of accuracy that, as a policy advisor, you found “equal parts liberating and uncomfortable”) you put the brides in the same camp. Why did you change this?

My actual work was almost completely focused on local brides, so just Iraqi women. But when I was thinking about how to bring this story to this market, it really felt inevitable that I would need to focus on a British Asian recruit. It’s already a challenging subject to get people to spend a lot of time on. Partly making [Sara] British, partly making it funny and plot-driven and entertaining—all of it was in service of people engaging with this book, beyond a narrow section of do-gooders. I’m not didactic about what people should take way from the book, but what I definitely wanted was the widest possible section of people grappling thoughtfully with these issues.

Do you have any nerves, publishing it?

I was a little concerned. I certainly wasn’t sending copies the UN’s way! [Laughs]. And I’m not holding out any hopes of being re-hired. I knew when I wrote the end on this manuscript, that I was also writing the end on my career of internal affairs. But ultimately, it was a book that I knew I would enjoy reading. To a certain extent, you have to leave it to the world. And there has been such an extraordinary snowballing of support for this book, which has made me feel a lot more confident about publishing it.

Last question. Is ‘fundy’ really an abbreviation used for fundamentalist?

Definitely a thing—my cousins and I used to accuse each of being one all the time.