The Reluctant Fundamentalist

chillibreeze writer — Nazia Mallick

The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Mohsin Hamid
Publisher: Penguin/Viking
Price: Rs.295/-

The ill-fated event of 9/11 where thousands of innocent persons lost their lives is one of the most unfortunate incidents in the Islamic world. It changed the world’s view of Islam and in some cases, strengthened the doubts and apprehensions surrounding it.

This lucidly written fictitious account by Mohsin Hamid makes for easy reading. However, the discerning reader will see beyond the fiction and realize that the book is part history and part polemics. Firmly marooned in the wounded realities of the post 9/11 worlds, it explores the growing distress between Islam and the West.

For the world, and especially for the West, the most prevalent image of Islam is of fanaticism, brutality, hatred and disorder. Stemming partly from a lack of information and partly from bad press, Islam is probably the most dangerously misunderstood religion in the world.

In Hamid’s book, this image is tersely captured, when the world finds itself in an increasingly strong grip of Islamophobia, and Muslims find themselves beleaguered and persecuted in the aftermath.

The reluctant fundamentalist is Changez; a Princeton- educated Pakistani youth, who has a high paying job in America. He is the product of an American university, earning a lucrative American salary, and infatuated with an American woman. He loves America. But his sweet American Dream turns into a bitter nightmare in the wake of September 11 attack, and he contritely confesses that a part of him “desired to see America harmed.”

The buoyant and carefree world around him overturns when he switches on the TV one day and watches the horrible terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. He discovers that his inner voice is in conflict with his non fundamental beliefs. Like many Muslim youth, who are in search of a dream in gigantic America, he finds himself caught in the perfidious currents of the East-West conflict.

He feels inside him a transformation that comes with a niggling sympathy for the attackers; almost ‘reluctantly’, he finds himself turning into an America bashing radical.

Mohsin Hamid goes deep into the psyche of fundamentalism and the simmering anger towards supercilious America and its insufferable interference in Vietnam, Middle East and Afghanistan. The narrative is a monologue between Changez and an unidentified American, who is his sole listener.

“I turned on the television and saw what at first I took to be a film. But as I continued to watch, I realized that it was not fiction but news. I stared as one – and then the other – of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Centre collapsed. And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be pleased”. (Pg. 72).

Check the, ‘smiled’. This single word captures both the ruefulness and the wrath of the protagonist. Changez is caught in the intricacies of hatred, liberalism and loyalty to his own faith. His earlier free thinking attitude was becoming venomous; clinging around his subtly judicious nature like poison ivy; and he finally succumbs to the inevitable fundamentalism.

There are little strokes of softer emotions, which are interspersed in the chapters where Changez’s one-sided love with a beautiful American girl Erica remains unrequited and leaves him troubled and disenchanted.

The storyline is engaging and easy on the mind, written with constrained guile and a unique narration technique.

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—About our writer:

Nazia says, "I was Born on a wet September evening, when the world was gazing with wonderment at a soggy rainbow, she screamed her lungs out for her own little space in this world; and since then she is still screaming...albeit silently! Currently, she is the Prodigal who has come back to her old love- Writing! Travelling is one of her many, many passions; and she believes in taking the roads less travelled."

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