ABSTRACT

InGiles Foden’s 2002 novelZanzibar, fictionalCIA expert JackQueller represents a lone voice drawing attention to Al Qaeda’s global and dispersed nature among a security establishment looking for the sovereign embodiment of enemies in the form of rogue states and evil civilizations. Queller’s recognition of the diversity of Islam and his experience with US funding of Al Qaeda when they were both fighting the Soviets make him more readily disposed to see Al Qaeda at work in unexpected locations around the globe, including, potentially, Western cities. Zanzibar’s plot revolves around the bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. Queller’s understanding of the threat posed by Al Qaeda’s diffuse nature puts him on the bombers’ trail, but he is not able to gather sufficient support in the intelligence community to act pre-emptively to stop the bombings. According to its cover, Zanzibar was ‘eerily prescient’ about the threat posed by Al Qaeda to the daily life of contemporary globalization. Muses Queller toward the end of the novel: ‘That was one of the frightening and unusual things about al-Qaida [sic] – the way it could slip to and fro, over relatively long periods of time, between the routines of everyday life and business and the extraordinary world of a terror organization, whose very purpose was to subvert the everyday’ (Foden 2002: 309).