Written by Mickey Grant   

IF M. Salahuddin Khan's new novel Sikander was a musical piece, it would be on the level of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. The power and scope of this epic novel covers a period of over 25 years. It manages to pull and subtlety comment on so much of what has happened between people of the Islamic world and the West. It starts with the beginning of a true mythic character named Sikander Khan. Without question the novel is the mythic journey of Sikander from a near Elysian fight with his father to his joining the mujahedeen as a result of accidentally meeting some of it’s members at a local Mosque the first night he was away from home in Northern Pakistan. It’s a challenge not giving away the story but hard to comment on it otherwise as so much recent history is interwoven in the plot. Sikander’s character is very nuanced in his creation and also amazingly easy to identify with even for a Westerner. If the book just covered the Afghan war against the Russians, it would still be great and well over 200 pages at that point. It moves forward to the period just after 9/11. Sikander has to go back to Afghanistan to get his in-laws out just as the American bombing started. Again, an amazing journey on mules unfolds. I don’t want to reveal much more. I’ll add that he did end up in one of the American prison camps in Guantanamo. That part of the story contains so much of what makes this book great. He recognizes that the Americans performing torture on him are actually in worse shape spiritually than him and he prays for them. This story evolves to the final part, which includes one of the torturers who at the end of the novel is in charge of security for the multimillion dollar American company he eventually manages to buy. A simplistic writer would have him to get his revenge but M. Salahuddin Khan instead seeks for Sikander a tremendous spiritual solution. It’s a metaphor for the spiritual solution we need now in our society in relationship to our Islamic bothers and sisters.