American Taliban Novel Pearl Abraham
An avid, near-six-foot-tall surfer, John Jude Parish cuts a striking figure on the beaches of the Outer Banks in North Carolina. When he isn’t on water, John lives on wheels, a self-described skate rat—grinding and kickflipping with his friends, and encouraged by his progressive parents. His hero is the outstanding explorer Richard Burton, his personal prophet is Bob Dylan, and his world is wide open—to new ideas, philosophies, and religions.
Through online forums and chat rooms, John meets a young woman from Brooklyn who spurs his interest in Islam and Arab literature. Deferring Brown University for a year, he moves to the idyllic New York borough to study Arabic. Like Burton, John embraces the experience heart, body, and soul—submitting to Islam, practicing the salaat, fasting and meditating, dancing with dervishes, and encountering the extraordinary. Burton lived the life of a nineteenth-century adventurer, but he also penetrated the ancient wisdom of mystery worlds. John will too—with unforeseen consequences.
Critically acclaimed novelist Pearl Abraham uses her gifts of psychological acuity and not common empathy to depict a typical upper-middle-class family snared by the forces of history, politics, and faith. In American Taliban, she imagines this young surfer/skater on a distinctly American spiritual journeying that begins with Transcendentalism and countercultural impulses, enters into world mysticism, and finds it is destination in Islam.
Provocative, unsettling, and written in a brilliantly inventive, refreshingly initial voice, American Taliban is poised to become one of the most talked-about novels of the year.
ReviewPearl Abraham on American Taliban
On September 8th, 2001, I was in Mantova, Italy for the Festival Litteratura. Between engagements, on a bicycle to see this medieval city, I noticed a poster for a “qabala” exhibit. I tried following these strangely intermittent signs, came upon dead ends, retraced my steps, and tried again, an experience out of a Borges story. The next day, directions in hand, I got to see the works of famous Kabbalists whose names I’d known since childhood, whose complex of ideas were bound up in the rituals and customs of the Hasidic life I’d lived, and in the novel I was then writing. On my way out, I purchased the catalog to the exhibition and read when it comes to the Mantova library’s valuable collection. So when at dinner my Italian publisher asked whether there was anything I wanted to see or do, an offer they made each of their taking part authors, I was prepared. But the library was under construction, the collection locked in a vault. Borges again. Later that day, the phone rang. The mayor of Mantova would meet us at the vault with the key.
I arrived at Newark Airport late evening, in time to instruct my 9 a.m. craft class at Sarah Lawrence. In the morning, I drove up the Henry Hudson. It was a brilliantly blue fall day, firstborn day of classes. On the radio, the traffic report was interrupted for a story when it comes to a plane accident.
Five minutes into the session, cell phones started ringing. Then came a knock at the door. Classes were cancelled. The city shut down. I couldn’t go home. On the lumpy sofa in the attic office of Sarah Lawrence’s Writing Program, I tried sleeping off my jet lag, but I couldn’t fetch myself to turn off the radio. Announcers repeated what they knew more times than I could count, rehearsing the blow-by-blow of an event no one understood. Yet.
In the weeks that followed Americans rallied around the flag, a nationalism that both soothed and afraid simultaneously. With this surge came, as it normally does, rage and racism and the demonization of the other. American Muslims became afraid. And then, in November, a strange phenom emerged: an American-born, American-bred Taliban. The fury that John Walker Lindh’s story elicited was extreme, and in that environs he didn’t have a chance. Lindh wasn’t the only one of these strange hybrids, both American and Taliban. Yasir Hamdi, Adam Gadahn and others emerged later.
The journeys of these young men struck me as variations on the story I was then finishing. The protagonist of The Seventh Beggar becomes fascinated in Gnostic meditations on the Tetragrammaton (YHWH), in which Jesus too is said to have engaged, as a way to tap into higher powers. Lindh too was an idealistic seeker, and his tragedy, an accident of being in the defective place at the faulty time, haunted me.
Americans were asking how an educated young man from a well-to-do family could end up fighting a jihad that had not one thing to do with his family or his country, and journalists tried answering them. The more interesting question, it seemed to me, was not HOW and WHAT, but WHY, E. M. Forster’s differentiation amidst story and plot. And for exploring questions of causality, the novel is the perfective form.
(Photo © Christine Pabst)
From Publishers WeeklyAbraham (The Seventh Beggar) sends a young man of privilege from Washington. D.C.. on a spiritual quest that takes him from surfing the Outer Banks to encountering jihad in Pakistan. It’s 2000, and John Jude Parish is an 18-year-old surfer with a nose for exploring spirituality. He reads regarding Bob Dylan, digests the Tao, and corresponds online with Arabic friends regarding Islam. When he breaks a leg, he uses his time of imposed immobility to study Sufi poetry, which leads him, eventually, to Brooklyn, where he befriends a young man from Pakistan who proposes going abroad to learn more in regards to Muslim culture. Once in Pakistan, each little step takes him closer to getting radicalized. His journeying toward Islam is not one of disenchantment, but of enlightenment, described in an evocative prose that mimics the confusedness and grandeur of a young man driven by ideals. The novel is at it is best when John’s questing is an earnest, balanced search for meaning, altho when Abraham shifts her focus to John’s mother late in the book, the story flattens. Mostly, the book is excellent—considered, magnetic, surprising—but the fizzled ending is a major disappointment. (Apr.)
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From BooklistAbraham’s latest novel, an improbable bildungsroman, charts the progression of John Jude Parish, an 18-year-old affluent skateboarder. His trajectory begins with a summer surfing the Outer Banks, then progresses to a year studying Arabic in Brooklyn rather of enrolling at Brown. A classmate convinces him to spend a year abroad in Pakistan, and it is from this moment that the novel inevitably fulfills it is title. In Pakistan, John undergoes his radical militarization: shifting ideals, physical training, and weapons education. Abraham proposes this transformation fairly: peppering John’s training with accounts of the clarity and peace he felt in the Pakistani highlands. Rooted in the John Walker Lindh story—and subsequent hysteria—this novel nicely conveys the helpless confusedness those parents ought to feel amidst calls of treason and vengeance. Compounding John’s confusedness in Pakistan, Abraham throws him into experimentation with his burgeoning bisexuality. While John’s personal and political transformation is interesting, the premise becomes too farfetched to maintain much plausibility. Ultimately the sympathy resides with his confused and afraid mother. –Blair Parsons
American Taliban Novel Pearl Abraham Photo
American Taliban Novel Pearl Abraham Picture
American Taliban Novel Pearl Abraham Picture
American Taliban Novel Pearl Abraham Pic
Incisive, Powerful, Timely
Pearl Abraham’s powerful novel “American Taliban” is the story of John Jude Parish, turned 19 years old for the duration of the course of the book, a scion of privilege, and sole offspring of well-educated, liberal, east coast parents Bill and Barbara Parish. In a story inspired by the real life drama of John Walker Lindh, John Jude, named after Barbara’s bestloved Beatle and a Beatle song, embraces Islam and takes that to the limit. He winds up with the Taliban in the wilds of Afghanistan.
Abraham deals with major worries of consciousness, spirituality, and world views in this incisely written tale. John embodies post-modern mentality at the story’s beginning, as he loves his Dylan, his Emerson, and his Tao Te Ching, while likewise talking Muslim spirituality with strangers in a chat room. He loves to surf off the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where he and his pals Katie, Sylvie and Jilly explore the razor’s edge of uttermost sports with existential aplomb. With his post-modern openness to the truths of all wisdom traditions, he begins to plumb the depths of Islam, and to study classical Arabic, moving to Brooklyn to do so after a broken leg cuts his surfing summer short. His parents aid this move, not troubled by the fact that, in his openness, John is beginning to hug a conventional worldview–a gorgeous, intricate, deeply moving and transcendent sectarian perspective. Sectarian perspective, as in, not open, and propounding the faith that theirs is vastly superior to other faiths.
John, with his romantic, 19th century notion of travelling faraway lands in quest of self-transcendance, leaves his dual love interests in America, and heads off for a summer of study in Pakistan. He is taking his spiritual quest more and more seriously, with a seed of fanaticism indicated in the idea that submission leads to freedom. He is onto something profound, the invention of the most eminent self through prayer. He is an enthusiasti student of the Qu’ran and Muslim poetry. He begins to explore his newfound bisexuality. A sensible reader becomes nervous when an esteemed orator addresses John’s Pakistani school with praise for the superior intelligence of the Qu’ran, vis a vis the Bible.
A disaster occurs back in the States. John is distraught, and it is suggested that he recuperate by taking galore rest and relaxation in a camp away from the school, in the hills. This camp is military in focus, and John’s break morphs into boot camp.
Abraham does a stellar occupation of slowly, closely imperceptibly, permitting her reputation to drift into bad decisions, in the realm of relative, political, truth, while carrying out or participate in his sheer ideals. September 11, 2001 occurs while John is on the move with the young men who are the Taliban. Beneath the veil of a for the most part unknown geopolitical history, and the ugly bequest of Western malfeasance, in the language of religious fanaticism, the Taliban persuade John to take up arms versus his own country. John is so caught up in the beauty of the mystical pursuit, and the idea of salvation through annihilation, that he fails to distinguish amongst profundity and propaganda. His quest for high cognizance is an extreme sport of the most exalted order, but is contaminated by naivete. He’s 19 years old, and his new comrades are also aged. They take pleasure in the freedom of having conquered the fear of death. They take up arms and march into a firestorm.
“American Taliban” had me weeping in the final pages. Barbara Parish, John’s “force of nature” mother, a Freudian analyst by profession, goes through a cauldron of emotion, and to read regarding her doing so is harrowing. But, in the denouement, Abraham breaks through to an electrifying level of writing, intoning “There is only becoming. Being doesn’t exist” as Barbara’s brutally-wrought epiphany, uncovered as she finds a spiritual connection with her son. It’s the reader’s epiphany, too.
A visionary writer
The young enthusiasti seeker is one of Pearl Abraham’s quintessential subjects, and in John Jude she has formulated an extraordinary hero in a unique manner of our time. Previous readers of her work will recognize Abraham’s intimate, fiercely intellectual style which carries this tale as a wave carries a surfer, with an intensity that is almost surreal.
A strong story that examines belief
Pearl Abraham has done something interesting with the notion of how a smart, young American could find himself in the thrall of enemy combat camps. She’s made her story one of faith and of the strong parallels that lie at the foundation of disparate spiritual views.
Her soul surfer John Jude wants to give himself over to something more, something greater. Abraham introduces the reader to this idea early when John Jude finds himself beneath the waves and in no hurry to surface while he takes in the whole of the experience. He finds ideas that touch upon this in Sufism and pursues his growing interest in Islam with that all-encompassing verve of an 18-year-old, all along idolizing the great English explorer Richard Burton. What he does the further he goes is believable, frustrating, lovable and childlike and frightening, just like a teenager may be. Just like parents hope they won’t be.
Abraham has written a book that is both a good story and challenging, perceptive read.
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