“You need to read it”, I told a friend this week over lunch at a Japanese restaurant. “It’s about a criminology lecturer who goes to Iraq to start a rehabilitation programme for Islamic State brides."
“And it’s a comedy?" he said.
Somehow it is.
Fundamentally takes place in contemporary Iraq, where author Dr Nussaibah Younis is an expert peacebuilding practitioner who has advised the government on rehabilitation programmes for Islamic State-affiliated women. Her protagonist Nadia enters this arena rather less well prepared.
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Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis: A comedy about a rehabilitation programme for Islamic State brides
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A lifelong outsider, belonging neither with her born-again Muslim mother nor in the looser ambience from which her fickle ex-girlfriend has recently exiled her, newly appointed UCL lecturer Nadia escapes London for a UN job in Iraq. Tasked with setting up a programme to deradicalise foreign women who fled their home countries to join Islamic State, Nadia discovers that this endeavour is controversial in theory and maddeningly difficult in practice. Corrupt government ministers, egomaniacal colleagues, cultural barriers and endless red tape await: “All jobs, no matter how lofty their goals, are composed of repetitive component parts.”
Nadia’s strange new world of international peacebuilding is populated by dopey idealists and petty tyrants. When she’s not navigating the bloated bureaucracy and inter-agency rivalries of the UN, she’s confronting the brutal reality of these Islamic State women’s lives that no amount of research could have braced her for. One of her charges, Sara, is a plucky east Londoner who joined Isis four years ago aged 15 and married three jihadists, who each died in turn. When Sara reveals a secret heartbreak, Nadia must choose between obeying the strictures of the programme and dropping everything to save the girl in whom she sees her younger self.
Younis ably navigates the ethical questions at play. In the view of some characters, Nadia’s programme condones foreign governments who illegally refuse to repatriate citizens on ideological grounds. Others claim that, pragmatically speaking, the programme is these stranded women’s best chance to return home. The women’s reasons for joining Isis in the first place are diversely sketched out, from grooming and trafficking to the racism of their home countries. Younis is generously empathetic and unafraid of nuance.
She’s also hilarious. Fundamentally uses every device in a humourist’s toolbox: physical comedy (“He looked wounded, as though I’d bitch-slapped him with my oversized labia”), understatement (“It’s only Corbyn level anti-Americanism”), irony (“When the French call you racist, you listen”) and taboo (“Palestine, Palestine, Israel” offers an Iraqi politician when asked at a professional meeting to play Two Truths and a Lie). The antics between woo-woo Californian imam Jason and his reluctant charges at the rehabilitation camp provide amusing set pieces to counterbalance the darker moments.
Just as enjoyable are the characters. Nadia is a compelling protagonist, idealistic but with a cunning streak that makes her naughtily human, and never above a one-night stand to deaden her emotional pain (“The ick suggested itself to me, but I dismissed it”). Her teenaged shadow self Sara is similarly memorable, her idiolect and directness positively refreshing amid the obfuscating, hypocritical aid workers.
Key supporting characters could do with more development; when devout Iraqi muslim Farris hugs Nadia in a moment of grief, “his humanity overriding his faith”, no room is given to the possibility that Farris might perceive a more complex relationship between the two. But everyone is well distinguished and serves their role in the text, with the “crazy family” of UN workers even evoking a certain cosiness until it all goes tits up.
At points you can tell it’s a debut novel. Closer attention could be paid to the prose: how can a face, or indeed anything, be “carved” from a red flag? The dialogue veers occasionally into woodenness and clunky exposition: “We’ll be ridiculed by the humanitarian sector and lambasted by the press, deservedly so”. Several non-native English speakers exclusively invoke their first language for expressions that anglophones learn in beginner classes; “I guess you’ve only been a lecturer for 10 minutes, n’est-ce pas?" said no actual French person ever.
It makes sense that an academic such as Nadia would intellectualise her emotions (“It felt now like my pain had a witness”) but this therapist-speak is not always credible as an impromptu response to whatever sudden development she must process. The ending is a little neat and rushed, with an act of instant forgiveness on Sara’s part that seems implausible given her well-established obstinacy.
But at her best, Younis shows how genuinely informative fiction can be, how it fosters nuance and empathy in ways conventional reportage may not always achieve. Fundamentally strikes many balances well: densely researched while compulsively readable, funny while packed with emotional heft, able to acknowledge moral ambiguity while avoiding easy relativism. This smart, punchy book is destined to spark conversation. It deserves to be a massive hit.
Naoise Dolan’s latest novel is The Happy Couple
