Esa Khattak is a sleuth for our century. The dashingly handsome detective is the star of six popular crime novels by Canadian writer Ausma Zehanat Khan, published between 2015 and 2019.
Like many other gentleman detectives, Khattak is paired with a working-class, broad-shouldered, crumb-spilling sidekick: Sergeant Rachel Getty. Yet unlike most fictional detectives, Khattak is a devout and practising Muslim. His sidekick is secular, yet she is neither bumbling nor biased. She might be good with a hockey stick, but she is also clever and eager to learn.
The six novels in the series are unusual not only for having a Muslim detective in the lead role, but also because Khattak sees himself as a guardian of the Muslim "ummah", or the greater community of believers. He and Getty work for Community Policing in Toronto. But from the very start, the series is interested in justice not only for Canadians, but for people around the world.
The Unquiet Dead (2015) was first in the "Rachel Getty and Esa Khattak" series. The narrative builds on Khan's PhD dissertation, which focused on the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. Yet this is not a historical tale. A former war criminal has been hiding in Canada, and he is found dead. Was it local Bosnian Muslims who killed him, or his opportunistic girlfriend? Who, if anyone, should be held responsible?
Boldly, The Unquiet Dead opens not with a high-action scene, but with a quote from the Quran. The opening paragraph begins with Khattak in prayer, "on a rug woven by his ancestors in Peshawar".
The book is mostly a fast-paced crime thriller: chasing down blind alleys and turning up occasional clues. There are outsized characters you might expect from any thriller. There is also family drama: Getty’s abusive parents, her brother’s disappearance and her crush on Khattak’s friend, Nate.
Yet Khan also manages to weave in information about the golden age of Al Andalus and testimonies about the 1995 massacre of Bosnian Muslims. All of the books in the series are in some way global.
Yet they present the world's dangers in a more sophisticated way than most contemporary crime thrillers. Khan's The Language of Secrets (2016) is based on the planning of a terrorist act. Its inspiration was the 2006 attempt to blow up the Canadian parliament building in order to force the country to recall soldiers from Afghanistan.
But Khattak and Getty don't only have to untangle a web of relationships between angry young people, but they also must navigate their colleagues’ xenophobia and anti-Muslim bias.
At the start of A Death in Sarajevo (2017), Khattak must stand before a commission to explain his actions in the previous book. He appears before an all-white inquiry board and is represented by a lawyer named Ian Fleet, as it had "been suggested to Esa that he would be better served by a lawyer named Ian Fleet than by his friend Faisal Aziz, who had been Esa's first choice as his legal counsel".
Khattak is frequently in trouble with his bosses – in part, because he does not exactly stay put in Community Policing, where he is meant to act as a liaison between minority communities and the police. In A Dangerous Crossing (2018), the story takes place among Syrian refugees in Greece, after a murder and disappearance among aid workers.
The novel Among the Ruins (2017) is set largely in Iran, where Khattak looks into the disappearance of a prominent Iranian-Canadian.
All these novels show us a deeply interconnected world. As Khattak reflects: "The question of ummah was always with him; it was a question of community, of rootedness in a common history, and the sharing of a present moment of crisis and decline."
The series fills a unique place in the English-language literary landscape. There are few other Muslim mystery series. But Khan's books are certainly not simply for Muslims. They suggest we all care about injustice, not only nearby, but all around our complicated, interconnected world.
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
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Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
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Power: 659hp
Torque: 1075Nm
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Mohammed bin Zayed Majlis
SQUADS
South Africa:
JP Duminy (capt), Hashim Amla, Farhaan Behardien, Quinton de Kock (wkt), AB de Villiers, Robbie Frylinck, Beuran Hendricks, David Miller, Mangaliso Mosehle (wkt), Dane Paterson, Aaron Phangiso, Andile Phehlukwayo, Dwaine Pretorius, Tabraiz Shamsi
Bangladesh
Shakib Al Hasan (capt), Imrul Kayes, Liton Das (wkt), Mahmudullah, Mehidy Hasan, Mohammad Saifuddin, Mominul Haque, Mushfiqur Rahim (wkt), Nasir Hossain, Rubel Hossain, Sabbir Rahman, Shafiul Islam, Soumya Sarkar, Taskin Ahmed
Fixtures
Oct 26: Bloemfontein
Oct 29: Potchefstroom
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