Home Fire

Aneeka is a 19-year-old law student at the London School of Economics. Raised by her older sister, Isma, and constantly being in the presence of her twin brother, Parvaiz, Aneeka develops a strong sense of loyalty to her family. Attractive, smart, and headstrong, Aneeka quickly makes the Home Secretary’s son, Eamonn, fall in love with her, hoping to use his connections to bring Parvaiz safely home from Syria. Eamonn is enchanted by Aneeka's beauty and “contradictory characteristics: sharp-tongued and considerate, serious-minded and capable of unbridled goofiness, as open to absorbing other people's pain as she was incapable of acknowledging the damage of having been abandoned and orphaned” (31).

Aneeka’s multifaceted personality is reflected in the way different people refer to her: To some, like Karamat, she is a “manipulative whore,” while Eamonn calls Aneeka his “fiancée” despite British press demonizing her, and Terry interprets her behavior with compassion and refers to her as “this orphaned student” (276).

As a law student, Aneeka has a strong sense of justice, and that’s what drives her to demand the British authorities repatriate her brother’s corpse to London. Mirroring Sophocles’ Antigone, Aneeka is as desperate in her fight for the burial rights as the main character of the eponymous play. No matter how hard Isma tries to keep her sister away from harm, she realizes that once Aneeka has her mind set on something, “there’s no convincing her” (276). Thus, Aneeka’s pursuit of justice and her unyielding nature is what leads to her premature death. 

Parvaiz is Aneeka’s twin brother, who joins ISIS, thus jeopardizing his sisters’ standing in the UK. Parvaiz and Aneeka were inseparable while growing up, and the two developed a very strong bond. On the outside, the twins are alike, “[Parvaiz] had Aneeka’s skin tone and her fine bones—but while hers made her look fierce, like a panther, his gave him a breakable air” (123), but on the inside, they are very different. While Aneeka is strong-willed and persistent, Parvaiz is gentle and indecisive.

An aspiring sound connoisseur by night and a greengrocer’s assistant by day, Parvaiz doesn’t fall into a category of men prone to being radicalized, yet his crisis of masculinity and yearning for being like his father spur him to leave Britain and go to Raqqa, Syria. Parvaiz isn’t a religious fanatic, “he was a Muslim; of course; he believed in God, and went to the mosque for Eid prayers, and put aside 2.5 percent of his income for zakat, which he split between Islamic Relief and the library campaign, but beyond that, religion had, since early childhood, been a space he'd vacated rather than live in it in the shadow of Isma's superiority” (158).

Therefore, it's not his religious zeal that made Parvaiz join ISIS, but rather his inability to resist manipulations from Farooq, a fellow British Muslim tasked with finding new recruits. Although shortly after arriving in Syria to join the ISIS media wing, Parvaiz regrets his decision to leave Britain, a way home for him is blocked by British laws that denaturalize citizens who fight on the side of the Islamic state. Nevertheless, Parvaiz tries to escape and makes his way to the British consulate in Istanbul, but he is killed by Farooq before he has a chance to ask British authorities to pardon his offense. 

Karamat is a British politician of Pakistani descent, who started his career as a member of parliament and eventually became the British Home Secretary. Opportunistic and unyielding, Karamat abandoned his Muslim background to win the mass appeal of the British public. In the British press, Karamat is “lionized for his truth-telling, his passion, the fearlessness with which he was willing to take on both the anti-migrant attitudes of his own party and the isolationist culture of the community he'd grown up in” (106). Although he is convinced that he is working in the name of “public service, national good, British values” (68), people like Isma, who see Karamat as an advocate of Islamophobic policies, view him as a “sellout, coconut, opportunist, [and] traitor” (46).

Nicknamed “The Lone Wolf,” Karamat made it his priority to pass a legislature that makes it possible to strip any British passport holders of their citizenship if they decide to join ISIS. Because of this law, Parvaiz is denaturalized, and, following his death, his body cannot be repatriated to Britain and is sent to Pakistan. Even though Karamat is personally involved with Parvaiz’s story, because his son is dating Aneeka, he refuses to make political concessions to help the Pashas. This testifies to the fact that for him, the matters of the state and his political image are more important than his obligations to his family. 

Eamonn is the son of the British Home Secretary, Karamat. Affluent and attractive, Eamonn, with his “thick dark hair, milky-tea skin, well-proportioned features, good height, nice shoulders” (19) and “polished manners” (25) is portrayed as a typical representative of the British elite. His connection with the Pasha family begins when he meets Isma while visiting relatives in the US. Although Isma immediately recognizes him as the Home Secretary’s son, Eamonn doesn’t talk to Isma about his father until they build a more trusting relationship. When he returns to the UK, Eamonn meets Aneeka and the two soon begin a passionate affair. Oblivious of Parvaiz’s destiny, Eamonn doesn’t suspect that Aneeka might be using him to get her brother back to Britain and falls in love with her. After Eamonn proposes to Aneeka, and she tells him the truth about Parvaiz, he discloses their relationship to his father to win his support. Karamat accuses his son of being spineless and falling for Aneeka’s manipulations and disallows any further contact between the couple.

Although at first, both in his relationship with Aneeka and then in his interactions with his father, Eamonn is portrayed as weak and submissive, his decision to denounce his father’s policy publicly and travel to Pakistan to be with Aneeka demonstrates his strength of character. By taking such a risky step as going to Karachi to be with his mourning fiancée, who at the time is staging a protest against his father's decision to ban the Pashas from burying Parvaiz in Britain, Eamonn attempts to regain his masculinity and a sense of dignity. Even though this decision leads to his death in a terrorist attack, Eamonn becomes an antidote to his father in his loyalty to Aneeka and in his fight for justice.  

Adil is the father of Isma, Aneeka, and Parvaiz. Adil disappeared when Isma was born and reappeared when she was 8, impregnated their mother with the twins, and left again with an aid convoy to Bosnia. He never returned home, and the last time the family heard from him was in 2001 when he called from Afghanistan. A few years later, the family found out that in 2002 Adil was captured and tortured in the Bagram Theater Internment Facility and then died while being transported to Guantanamo Bay.

In the pictures of him that Farooq shows to Parvaiz, Adil looks like “a laughing, broad-shouldered man” (63), and Farooq describes him as a brave warrior who fought against the oppression of Muslims. Isma, on the contrary, while describing her father to Eamonn, comments that he “tried his hand at many things in this life—guitarist, salesman, gambler, con-man, jihadi, but he was most consistent in the role of absentee father” (63). Adil and his path as a warrior instill in Parvaiz a feeling of inadequacy, which eventually leads him to join ISIS so he can prove that he is worthy of being called his father’s son. 

Farooq is a British Muslim residing in London who secretly works on recruiting British men to join ISIS. He chooses Parvaiz as his target because he knows about his father’s path as a jihadi, and subsequently manipulates Parvaiz first into questioning his manhood, and then into deciding to travel with him to Syria. While deepening Parvaiz’s crisis of masculinity, Farooq, conversely, performs hypermasculinity: He is portrayed as “a compact but powerfully built man, muscles distorting the shape of his tightly fitting bomber jacket” (147) with “an instant glamour to him that excused all accents” (147).

Implicit homoeroticism is traceable in the relationship between the two men throughout the novel, and Farooq repeatedly refers to Parvaiz as “my brave warrior” (171), “my faithful warrior” (174), and “my little warrior” (219). When Parvaiz realizes that Farooq used him to show his cousins how to find and prepare ISIS recruits, the relationship between the two men become strained, and when Parvaiz attempts to escape, Farooq kills him. Sly and manipulative yet seemingly sincere and friendly, Farooq becomes an embodiment of ISIS agents who expand the network of jihadists outside Syria.

Terry is Eamonn’s mother and the wife of Karamat, the British Home Secretary. Irish-American, she is “one of Europe's most successful interior designers, with a chain of stores from Helsinki to Dubai, bearing her name” (126). She met Karamat when she was 16, and although they were deeply in love at first, with time, there formed “a separateness to their lives” (127). Terry is considered “the most admired of Westminster wives by a mile, according to a recent poll” (276), but her public image contrasts with her real personality. When Karamat discloses to the press the information about Eamonn’s relationships with Aneeka, Terry cannot forgive him and doesn't allow him to enter their bedroom. Compassionate and strong-willed, she tries to convince her husband to revert his policies toward the Pashas, but to no avail.