Al-Qaeda’s Super Secret Weapon

I should say this up front: I don’t read a lot of erotica. I come to literature for intellectual stimulation, not erotic. That said, for all its erotic content, Al-Qaeda’s Super Secret Weapon is an extremely intellegent riff on the fundamentalist values of conservative America, the fundamentalist values of certain sects of Islam, and gay culture itself.

The protagonist, Mahmoud, is a member of an Al-Qaeda cell. After hearing McCain state on television that the American’s military’s ban on homosexuality should stay in place so that soldiers are not “distracted,” Mahmoud’s cell decides to learn “the gay lifestyle” and introduce it into the American military. Over the course of the novel, Mahmoud falls for the blonde-haired American man Steve, who he enters into a relationship with. Steve calls Mahmoud his “swarthy little lamb kebab.”

The jokes are a mile a minute and span gay culture, military culture, Middle Eastern culture, and on and on.

Now, if that had been all there was to tell, I might not have proceeded to write up this review. But the real gem of this piece is its thematic core: Mahmoud’s struggle to reconcile his feelings for Steve with his identity as a terrorist. He feels trapped between two conflicting worlds and struggles to find himself.

That the novel succeeds in blending its satire with this deeper element and be simultaneously entertaining, is a great feat that few stories achieve, but Al-Qaeda’s Super Secret Weapon pulls it off with extraordinary finesse. I have one qualm with its execution. There is a page of text near the center of the novel that breaks the narrative in order to explain this thematic core directly. Big no-no. While itself humorously written, the story would have been stronger if I could have been allowed to arrive at that conclusion myself.

Overall, this is a very solid story—excellent satirical social commentary woven elegantly into thematic underpinnings—and I can highly recommend picking up a copy. Though if you are offended by religious commentary or graphic depictions of sex, you should steer clear of this one.