Stereotypes of Fundamentalism and Consequences

Stereotypes of Fundamentalism and Consequences

‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid is a dramatic monologue of a young Pakistani named Changez, who is chasing corporate success on Wall Street. As a Pakistani man, he recounts the tale of his brief and torrid love affair with America to an anonymous American whose responses can only be heard through Changez’s voiced perceptions. The novel circles around Changez’s changing identity as he struggles with his shifting loyalties to America and Pakistan during the aftermath of the terrorist attack on the twin towers on September 11, 2001. Hamid uses this scenery as a tool to demonstrate the different stages in Changez personal development and the discovery of his own identity. He also created a significant connection between Erica, his love interest, and America, partnered with his purposeful use of this scenario in order to demonstrate the destructive nature of nostalgia. However, we see how the meaning of Hamid’s novel altered as a result of these changes when Mira Nair adapted his novel into a movie. The movie was quite different than the novel, because in the movie it was revealed that the anonymous American was a spy, and in the ending of the movie we also know that Changez was not the extremist nor did he kidnap the American professor. Also, in the movie Changez was detained and strip-searched at the airport. When watching the movie we are not left on our own to come up with the ending of this story. Instead we see how after 9/11 Changez finds himself caught in a conflict between his American dream, a hostage crisis, and the enduring call of his family’s homeland.

In my view, it was probably quite challenging for Hamid to write this book. The book is a dramatic monologue where one Pakistani man is telling the whole story to the reader. In the book we does not hear any other voices other than this narrator. As readers there is no other way to verify the narrator’s story, except by coming up with our own story line. In one of his interview the author said: "I wanted to write about American as an insider, but also someone who is Pakistani” (Publisher Weekly by Ruby Cutolo). He writes about this American who is paranoid about the narrator, and at the same time, Hamid tries to draw a scenario in the readers mind where this American can be a spy or maybe not. We do not know which is true. But still he wrote about it and that is a quite a difficult thing to do especially, when Hamid is claiming to be a Pakistani at the same time. The challenging part for Hamid would be keeping a systematic balance between the American, the Pakistani, and also with his readers. That he did very neatly by keeping his Pakistani side separate from his American side.

Mira Nair, the director of the movie had to face a few challenges when she decided to make this political thriller into a movie. The first challenge she faced was making it adaptable for the screen by writing the screenplay for the movie. Although Hamid did help her with the early draft of the screenplay she later went to other screenwriters who suggested that she drop the word “Fundamentalist”. According to them the word “Islam is a turn off (The Sunday Morning Herald)”. What they are saying is whenever people hear the word “Fundamentalist” they will think about the radical Muslims, extremists, the war on terror and the Middle East but her movie is not about that. Her movie is about this young man who is resisting fundamentalism that has been put upon him without his consent. She insisted on keeping the word “Fundamentalist” because she thinks that the word doesn’t only relate to Islam, but instead can have a different perspective that we as an audience are totally ignorant about. Rather we only believe what the media showed us and we as an audience believed in it without questioning them or ourselves. Later when it came to financing the movie one of her investors offered her two million dollars for the whole movie but when she said she would need more than that he said “ when you have Muslim as a protagonist, two million is all it’s worth” (NY Times 2013). She thought this investor was telling the truth because any thing that has to do with Islam and America is always a critical issue because of the nature of the subject and the media’s representation of Islam as well.

Moshin Hamid published his novel (2007) after 9/11. Before 9/11 the relationship between US-Pakistan was quite complex. Since its independence from the British Empire in 1947 Pakistan and the US have had a diplomatic relationship that has been up and down. It stayed harmonious throughout the Soviet era. During the cold war Pakistan let the US use its air force base for its U-2 spy plane program and also during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, where the US provided funding to train Muslim fundamentalists to fight against the Soviet invasion. But this friendly relationship didn’t stay the same after the US approved sanctions against Pakistan for its nuclear weapons program. Then again it changed after the 9/11 attacks on the US. Pakistan once again assumed an important role in American geopolitical interests in the region and the so-called war on terror. Despite all this the US provides lots of economic support and the US is the second largest weapon supplier to Pakistan.

In the Hamid novel he never explicitly explained the Pakistan and US relationship but in the movie Mira Nair seemingly made this relationship clear for the audience by showing us how the US operatives are working from their secret bases in Pakistan. The movie was different than the novel Hamid wrote and the book ended ambiguously, where we as a reader had to figure out through our own imagination who was the American and is the narrator actually a terrorist or not. According to Nair, in the movie they had to come up with an ending and also a role for the unknown American and for the narrator. Besides, Hamid is a big fan of Mira Nair films; he sold her the rights and helped her out with the first draft of the screenplay too. In one of her interviews Ms. Nair made clear “that for cinematic reasons, they would have to fill in some of the novel’s blanks. They had to establish who these two characters are from the beginning…American was a C.I.A. officer working undercover as a journalist and that the Pakistani was a popular