The Jihadi

Life's journey is complex and diverse. War is being continually waged on various fronts in different shapes and forms. First, there is a war against oneself - call it an inner drive or a journey hidden in the depths of one's own heart. And then there is the outer war in the visible world.

The Jihadi unfolds as a chance meeting with an American professor in Jakarta lands a Bangladeshi youth in his dreamland: America. By the time the youth fi nishes his studies, he has formed a bond with the professor, his American host family and several others. But it is now time to leave the US and return to the East, where his perceptive mind begins to think deeply about human experience and the world around him.

The Jihadi is a portrayal of a man's inner and outer worlds that takes the reader into powerfully real situations of the author's devising. The events that unfold along the young man's journey are something one has imagined, met or, at least, seen in passing; but this story brings the reality home.

The author gives himself the space to develop the theme and fi nally confronts his own deep-seated, dark shadow. He traces life's passage from its root through the gruesome ordeals contributing to its violent nature and at the same time making him realise that all along he has been living in a world dominated by his long past. He concludes that an embryo in its mother's womb is not the beginning of a new life--it is the new beginning of an ancient life.