There are Other Worlds

A review of ‘Another World: Losing our Children to Islamic State’

‘Another World: Losing our Children to Islamic State’ by Gillian Slovo developed with Nicolas Kent
from his original idea is playing at the Temporary theatre at the National Theatre in London. Over
the past year the terror attacks of ISIS or the Islamic State have spread across the world causing
widespread fear and anxiety for governments and populations alike. And as is generally the case, the
West with its myopic view and lack of interest in what goes on in the worlds outside of themselves is
in a quandary about the origins, reasons and motivations of these attacks. To make matters worse,
young men and women from the UK and other countries in Europe have been going off to Syria to
join the Islamic State and its army. Much like a deer caught in headlights, the West is scrambling for
answers. What is it that makes these young men and women leave a world of security and
contentment to join forces with ‘savage’ armies in the unknown lands of Syria? What ‘demons’ of
their existence in the safety net of the western world force them out? What choices are they making
when they choose to devote their lives to the cause of the Islamic State and are willing to forsake
their safe futures for a life of violence and extreme uncertainties? These are the questions that
‘Another World’ seeks to ask. Slovo and Kent have researched the Islamic State for months and
interviewed people affected by and fighting against it in various capacities, to create a piece of
verbatim documentary theatre which poses some of the these enquiries, facts, opinions and
positions to the theatre going audience and ultimately, to the stage of national debate.

This is a piece I would encourage people to see - as much for what it says, as for what it remains
silent about. It is brave in today’s hyper anxious political space that it brings to the fore questions
about the formation of the Islamic State, the rise of fundamentalist Islamic groups, the West’s
vested interest in encouraging and investing in them to enable their war on communism, and the
seclusion and exclusion that young Muslim men and women feel in European societies. In fact, the
National Theatre may even get some flak for seeming to be empathetic to the voices that may be
disruptive in a situation where any apparent divergence from a homogenised, soft islamophobia is
seen as suspicious.

However, the key problem of the piece also emerges from exactly that juncture. It does not push the
political questions enough for it to make an engrossing and relevant debate – one that is pertinent
not just for the West but for the rest of the world. There are many such instances in the piece, let
me give a few examples. The relationship of economy, oil and power never comes up once in the
piece. While it alludes to the West’s support and funding of armed Islamic groups to counter
communism, there is no reference made to the former’s relationship with the Wahhabis of Saudi
Arabia and the weight that generates to tilt any discussion on the many representations of Islam
towards the more hard-line version of it. This is quite telling when at a particular moment in the
piece the Communist State and the Islamic State are spoken of as if they were the same, but a
fundamentalist theocratic state does not once come up for discussion. If one is interrogating the
Islamic State, the debate does not even begin unless one brings into the mix Saudi Arabia and Israel
– both states where religion plays a vital, in fact central role in governance. There are enough
reports of violence against other systems or beliefs or the lack of one, as well as human rights
violations in both these states.

In fact, the word ‘Palestine’ – and I say ‘word’ consciously because if it was meant to be a country it
would have been dealt with more care in the piece – is thrown around twice without any reference
to its current occupation and the West’s collusion in the creation of a warzone on innocent lives. In a
work that is trying to question the radicalisation of young people, how can interrogations of the
nature of state and the relationships between state, religion and economy be ignored? We have
often spoken about the ‘war on terror’ but as one would wonder, should not a ‘war on the
economics of war’ also be part of this debate? The imagery used in the piece does not help either.
While the images of Paris are shown and attacks on Brussels are mentioned, only passing references
are made as to how the media should also speak about ‘other cities’ where terrorist attacks have
happened. There is not a single image of the devastation of these ‘other cities’ or its people; nor the
ways in which civilizational histories are being erased in their own parts of the world by the Islamic
State. That the Islamic State is causing the most hurt and catastrophe in its own regions is left out of
the discussion. Is this because the West is not interested in people living in these regions, or because
their lives are collateral damage unless they have a direct bearing on the lives of the West?

The piece presents a character in what is portrayed as a more ‘liberal’ Islamic family with a mixed
Shia and Sunni parentage. Her role in the production is to point towards the very important battle
for power between the Shias and Sunnis that marks a large part of the strife in the Muslim world.
However, it is delivered without the context that in most institutionalised religions across the world
factions have always been problematic and contentious throughout history. A country where not
many centuries ago a whole new church was created to accommodate the desire of the King for
divorce and remarriage can hardly be unaware of the intra-religious politics for power; not to speak
of the wide ranging differences between the Roman Catholic, Protestant and various other churches
in Christianity. Also, the ways in which she delivers her points of view, almost scoffing at the
audience, makes the whole thing a joke of sorts. So while the facts and figures of the rising Islamic
State and its ways are important lessons in History 1.1 for people in the UK, it remains just that – a
very basic fundamental course. And the partial blindness makes the piece rather bland and inert
exactly at places it could have risen from its own place to make itself a significant political work.

The other important question that the piece is seeking to ask is why young people from Europe are
joining the Islamic State and its forces. The most poignant in that exploration is perhaps where a
speaking head talks about the only way for the West to fight the seduction of the Islamic State is to
give young people a better alternative way of being than they currently have, to that which is being
offered by the Islamic State. However, this exploration too remains on the surface, since one does
not go into the depths of what this sense of discontentment and lack of purpose in life could really
be caused by. There could have been a place made for a more philosophical debate of ways of being,
especially since in other parts of the production the ways of being a good Muslim are talked about.
Even the mothers lament not knowing what’s missing in their children’s lives and being in ‘another
world’, from where the piece gets its title. But the part that is really dealt with very well is the crisis
of identity that is such an important aspect of feeling alienated, and many young Muslim men and
women in Europe face this today with the gradual polarisation that is happening in society. And this
is a vicious cycle – increase in terror attacks leads to more media attention, increase in the
ostracisation of Muslims and finally more alienation of Muslim youth, increasing the likelihood of
their radicalisation. The sequences with the young students really stand out brilliantly depicting the
fragility of their vulnerable existence and the lack of choices they have to live as fully integrated
citizens of a European state. Having said that, one also wonders whether there could have been
another way of framing this question as to why young people are leaving – not in the differences
between the life they are leaving and the one they want to embrace, but in their similarities. One
could argue that life in the west is also at war at a more structural level – where one takes
extraordinary risks and suffers extreme losses, where agony far outweighs the pleasure, and all
meaning leaks out of daily existences. So in this context leaving this terrain to join a real, physical,
tangible war might make more sense where the rewards of being associated with a larger cause
brings meaningful sense of purpose to existence. And to counter this, what does the west have to
offer its young?
While the content of the piece leaves a lot of questions open, the form too works in some places and
does not in some others. This form of verbatim theatre can be very hard hitting if it is played well.
Quite like a documentary film, it has the power to question and convince with factual, multiple
truths. In this piece too part of it worked really well with the narratives of the mothers, individually
and as a collective, giving voice to the pain of loss and longing for their children. Their stories had the
lightness of touch that is so important sometimes in presenting ‘truths’. There is at least an attempt
there to see parallels in the lives of ‘mothers’ so to say, in Belgium and Syria. But having said that,
the narrative there is still patronising, that of the Western mothers ‘helping’ their counterparts
elsewhere. There is no voice of the ‘other’ mothers – the ones running away from the Islamic State,
the ones losing their children in non-European cities both to terror attacks as well as to terrorist
groups, the one resisting the military onslaughts on their lives both by western and Islamic military.

As far as the other verbatim pieces in the production are concerned, mostly they seem quite didactic
and strained to me. The problem for me was mainly that the speaking heads that represented
academic research on radicalisation, military, counter terrorist activities and policies of government
carried a certain arrogance of knowledge that assumed the audience clueless and ignorant. They
came and sat in chairs individually and grouped by their positions at times, rearranging their seats
slightly with no change in lights or entry and exit. They kept lecturing to the audience with facts and
opinions individually and separately, in full confidence without a flicker of doubt or conflict in what
they were stating. It seemed too clear and unflinching to be how truth looks like in reality – always
marred in shadows of other thoughts. Documentaries are exciting when there are conversations
between conflicting points of views and a debate that happens in the piece that can then be
experienced by the audience. The debates don’t need to necessarily find solutions or even
conclusions, but what they must do is give a sense that a good duel was had with arguments and
counters from various sides of a story. That is also perhaps what theatre is made up of. In this piece
though, there was very little going on between the various contradicting and conflicting points of
view on stage. They were not speaking to each other, but only to the audience, and in a way that
seemed they were not even aware of each other on stage. This kept the various positions in silos,
isolated from each other, quite like it often happens in real life. It is unfortunate that the option that
theatre enjoys, unlike real life vested interests, of being able to create dialogues between world
views and philosophies was not truly utilised by the form. A form that is chosen in the performing
arts to interrogate a current and deeply concerning issue with a complete absence of conversation
between thoughts and positions in real life, perhaps owes a little more to do so on stage – for its
own sake, as well as for the audience.

So ‘Another World’ for me was not quite the world I hoped to receive as it left a lot wanting, but it
certainly is a world I would encourage people to inhabit in order to begin their own journeys into
questioning the worlds we inherit.

Arundhati Ghosh