Cricket, caliphates and metalhead 'jihadis'

A book about contemporary journalism, Siddharthya Roy's The Company of Violent Men has an aptly clickbaity title. The violent men rarely materialize — instead, there is a succession of bloviating men.

- Syed Saad Ahmed

But, Roy's book does tell us a lot about men whom prevailing narratives and certain journalists eager to concoct a story might arbitrarily deem violent.

In its pages, we meet refugees, small-time wheeler-dealers, and civilians going about their lives amid a vortex of conflict or dispossession. The book is also an intriguing account of what goes on behind the scenes in journalism. The author pursues stories that often start with a promising lead, but eventually run into dead ends. They might not have seen the light of publication earlier, but Roy has now repurposed them as a book.

In the first chapter, he talks about stumbling upon what seems like a breakthrough after the 2016 terrorist attack on Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka. He uses his programming skills to geolocate online posts and traces many back to a "nameless unfinished mosque" in that city. Roy travels from New York to Dhaka, pretends to be a Bengali-American Muslim, and takes on the alias Yasin to investigate further. Twenty pages later, however, all we learn is that the people who ran the mosque "weren't terrorist material." The section ends with no new insight on the bakery attack.