Esa Khattak: How this fictional detective blends his Muslim faith with fighting crime

The protagonist in Ausma Zehanat Khan's series sees himself as a guardian of 'ummah'

Ausma Zehanat Khan is the author of the groundbreaking series. Getty Images

Esa Khattak is a sleuth for our century. The dashingly handsome detective is the star of six popular crime novels by Canadian writer Ausma Zehanat Khan, published between 2015 and 2019.

Like many other gentleman detectives, Khattak is paired with a working-class, broad-shouldered, crumb-spilling sidekick: Sergeant Rachel Getty. Yet unlike most fictional detectives, Khattak is a devout and practising Muslim. His sidekick is secular, yet she is neither bumbling nor biased. She might be good with a hockey stick, but she is also clever and eager to learn.

The six novels in the series are unusual not only for having a Muslim detective in the lead role, but also because Khattak sees himself as a guardian of the Muslim "ummah", or the greater community of believers. He and Getty work for Community Policing in Toronto. But from the very start, the series is interested in justice not only for Canadians, but for people around the world.

The Unquiet Dead (2015) was first in the "Rachel Getty and Esa Khattak" series. The narrative builds on Khan's PhD dissertation, which focused on the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. Yet this is not a historical tale. A former war criminal has been hiding in Canada, and he is found dead. Was it local Bosnian Muslims who killed him, or his opportunistic girlfriend? Who, if anyone, should be held responsible?

Boldly, The Unquiet Dead opens not with a high-action scene, but with a quote from the Quran. The opening paragraph begins with Khattak in prayer, "on a rug woven by his ancestors in Peshawar". 

The book is mostly a fast-paced crime thriller: chasing down blind alleys and turning up occasional clues. There are outsized characters you might expect from any thriller. There is also family drama: Getty’s abusive parents, her brother’s disappearance and her crush on Khattak’s friend, Nate.

Yet Khan also manages to weave in information about the golden age of Al Andalus and testimonies about the 1995 massacre of Bosnian Muslims. All of the books in the series are in some way global.

Yet they present the world's dangers in a more sophisticated way than most contemporary crime thrillers. Khan's The Language of Secrets (2016) is based on the planning of a terrorist act. Its inspiration was the 2006 attempt to blow up the Canadian parliament building in order to force the country to recall soldiers from Afghanistan.

But Khattak and Getty don't only have to untangle a web of relationships between angry young people, but they also must navigate their colleagues’ xenophobia and anti-Muslim bias.

At the start of A Death in Sarajevo (2017), Khattak must stand before a commission to explain his actions in the previous book. He appears before an all-white inquiry board and is represented by a lawyer named Ian Fleet, as it had "been suggested to Esa that he would be better served by a lawyer named Ian Fleet than by his friend Faisal Aziz, who had been Esa's first choice as his legal counsel".

Khattak is frequently in trouble with his bosses – in part, because he does not exactly stay put in Community Policing, where he is meant to act as a liaison between minority communities and the police. In A Dangerous Crossing (2018), the story takes place among Syrian refugees in Greece, after a murder and disappearance among aid workers.

The novel Among the Ruins (2017) is set largely in Iran, where Khattak looks into the disappearance of a prominent Iranian-Canadian.

All these novels show us a deeply interconnected world. As Khattak reflects: "The question of ummah was always with him; it was a question of community, of rootedness in a common history, and the sharing of a present moment of crisis and decline."

The series fills a unique place in the English-language literary landscape. There are few other Muslim mystery series. But Khan's books are certainly not simply for Muslims. They suggest we all care about injustice, not only nearby, but all around our complicated, interconnected world.