“The night of the pig, Cometh. LEAVE. By Order of the Blood Of Christ Crusaders”: This is the letter Marah’s mum finds at their door, complete with upside-down red crucifixes and an image of a pig’s head. It is a warning from the far-right, fascist Christian militia, the Bloods, of what is to come. And come it does.
Tariq Mehmood’s latest novel, The Second Coming, deals with the question of how imperial Britain survives the extreme violence, precarity, and inequalities it has instigated.
Drawing on his own experiences of political organising, Mehmood, lead defendant in the Bradford 12 trial, addresses this which he calls the “English question”: a not-so-distant future where the chickens of empire have come home to roost.
The novel follows 17-year-old Marah in London as her plans to go to medical school are scuppered by a fascist takeover that leaves her questioning her own identity, power, and understanding of how the world works.
Part dystopian sci-fi, part coming-of-age, the novel is a captivating and moving entrance into a plausible future Britain collapsed into civil war.
In 277 pages the reader is taken on a rousing journey to places they could not guess they would end up in just pages before.
While the poetics of Marah’s experience will resonate with the reader, the poetry planted throughout the text is also a delight.
The poetry is a dialogue in itself, drawing on works such as Shiv Kumar Batalvi and Mu’in Bseiso, and original works voiced mostly through Marah: “Out of the ruins of a story she was writing, she found the bones of a wounded poem.” (p.13)
Reading the book in August felt far from reading a work of fiction, but a prophecy. I read the book just days after Britain faced almost one week of far-right riots and pogroms attacking those deemed to be Muslim, refugee, or immigrant.
These pogroms saw temporary accommodation for asylum seekers firebombed and attacked; mosques, shops, and homes firebombed and defaced; and violent attacks against racialised people.
The instigation of these pogroms came from the political and media class’ obsession with the rhetoric to “stop the boats” and assert their robust support for Israel’s genocide.
The unchallenged Islamophobia in both major parties at the general election in July provided the hysteria and confidence for white mobs to inflict terror across the country.
Not limited to the streets, these pogroms were hardly condemned by mainstream media and the government. Prime Minister Keir Starmer took days to make a statement, and when he did, he failed to label these as Islamophobic attacks nor mention that mosques were a direct target.
Likewise, a reporter from the BBC described one riot as a ‘pro-British march’. This is mirrored in Mehmood’s novel, where an attack on a mosque by far-right militia merits the breaking news headline: “Muslims Riot in London” (pg.59).
The Second Coming opens with Marah noticing “how many Muslim houses and shops had been boarded up” on a bus home from college, outside they see Muslim homes vandalised and their windows shattered.
I vividly recall a photo posted on social media in August of a home in Liverpool that had been defaced: ‘SEND EM BACK’ had been scrawled in black paint over the front and ‘NO ROOM’ was smeared on the front door with red paint.
Just like the threats of “the Night of the Pig”, I was reminded of the England-flag-riddled graphics produced and shared on social media channels by unnamed groups calling for riots and pogroms against mosques, housing for asylum seekers, and Muslim-owned shops and homes.
As Marah’s mum aptly puts it in the book “The night of the long knives has come, my child, but now with new daggers, cutting into a thousand old wounds” (p.25). These old wounds were publicly and overtly cut in August, but this violence is nothing new.
In fact, when these riots erupted many turned to Mehmood and others to learn from the ways they had mobilised and organised in defence of their communities in the 1970s and 1980s.
Those of us turning to this history will be glad of the existence of such a pertinent book that quite literally passes down the most critical analysis and lessons from Mehmood’s generation to us as to how we grapple with a deeply Islamophobic and xenophobic Britain which is participating in and defending a genocide in Palestine.
Mehmood’s voice is clear in Marah’s mum’s cutting analysis and guidance which, combined with Marah’s journey to political consciousness, provide readers with a powerful text for the need for organised resistance.
I finished the book unable to separate it from my own making sense of this moment in Britain. As anti-fascist and anti-zionist movements have seen a huge resurgence in the past year, there are very important lessons to take away from this novel, particularly around colonial violence, resistance, and the weaponisation of identity.
While Mehmood might have written this before the riots in August, which have shifted discourses on Islamophobia and the far-right in Britain, the novel feels like a mirror pointing at us which is extending into the next decades.
The novel neatly combines serious and vital themes with constant humour and the joys of human relationships.
The Second Coming is more than timely, it’s essential for all of us who have been concerned by emboldened fascism, untrammelled Islamophobia, and imperial violence.
Nuvpreet Kalra is an organiser and writer based in London. She is currently serving as the Digital Content Producer at CODEPINK
