Her breaking of the invisible chains of her condition as a Muslim widow who should never speak her mind corresponds with the beginning of her end. Asma’s speech at the globally broadcast public hearing represents one of the most powerful moments in Waldman’s novel . There, the garden is—virtually—put up for debate, the real purpose of the assembly of officials and families of the victims being its rejection on the pretext of a democratic exercise. Mohammad Khan tries to explain the multiple influences he might have had, stressing that the pattern predates Islam by at least a millennium, and commits involuntary blasphemy, suggesting that the man who wrote the Qur’an might have described these already existing gardens as an image of paradise, in comparison with the surrounding desert. Then, one by one, various speakers take the stage and share their viewpoints and reasons for denying Khan’s right to design the memorial . Asma, who ‘was a family member as much as the white women she saw on the news , [who] had the fatherless child and an empty bed to prove it’ (290) and who had started to see in Khan’s memorial the sole chance of bringing her husband’s memory back from the oblivion, decides to participate in the hearing, despite her people’s warning that she should rather remain unseen, and despite her inability to speak English. With Nasruddin as her interpreter, Asma is exposed to a long series of Islamophobic speeches:Some of them said anything associated with Islam was ‘painful’ to them; that the garden was a paradise for the killers, that the name Mohammad was connected to a religion of violence, of the sword. The chairman allowed all these comments, as if Muslims were second-class citizens—or worse, as if they deserved no respect. Fury rocked her. Fury for the name of the Prophet, peace be upon him, to be taken so. For Mohammad Khan to be abused. (294)
Against Nasruddin’s desperate advice, she decides to speak, to defend her husband’s right to a memorial , to explain their reasons to be in America and, most of all, to try to debunk all the stereotypes of the Muslim as a raging terrorist . ‘You have mixed up these bad Muslims, these bad people, and Islam . […] There are so many more Muslims who would never think of taking a life. You talk about paradise as a place for bad people. But that is not what we believe’ (296). Her most bitter remarks, such as ‘we do not tell you what it means to be Christian’ (296) or ‘you should be ashamed’ (297) pass untranslated by Nasruddin, who then faces public opprobrium for not letting her speak, especially from the feminists, Muslim and non-Muslim, who claim her as one of their own.
Soon, the propaganda apparatus is set in motion—Asma’s statements are requested by news channels and even by the American television icon, Oprah Winfrey; the Muslim American Coordinating Council want to put her in an ad campaign, t-shirts are printed and Asma is treated as if she ‘now stood for Muslim women across the globe’ (313). Always a journalist , Amy Waldman does not omit to present the disadvantages of this overnight celebrity—the hate letters calling her a ‘terrorist bitch’ and threatening to burn her, which can be regarded as proleptic, but first and foremost, the interference of the same character who had unveiled the name of Mohammad Khan: the unscrupulous Alyssa Spier. Claiming that she is ‘just trying to get a sense of the woman behind the story’ (315), the tabloid journalist makes Nasruddin’s teenager daughter speak and reveals Asma’s status as an illegal immigrant. Facing deportation, despite her lawyer’s promises to fight for her, Asma decides to leave America and return to Bangladesh. Her last moments before departure, when she tries ‘to fit a whole country, the idea of a country, in her luggage: Nike shoes, T-shirts with Disneyland and the White House […] glossy magazines and American flags, history books, tourist brochures…’, in an attempt to ‘create for her and Abdul a Little America back home’ (322) is the last glimpse into her ‘Occidentalisation’, the last touch in the construction of a woman who has been and has remained an Other all along, but who has always wanted to become an American woman, to be able to speak and think without constraints. Her decision to return to Bangladesh is felt as an abandonment of ‘her own hopes of being something more than mother, widow, daughter-in-law’ (323) –a powerful statement on the part of a woman conditioned to submission all her life. Defeated, and choosing again her dutiful submission , Asma feels her return to her own country as an exile.
Surrounded by neighbours and press gathered to see her leave, Asma is stabbed to death in front of her blockhouse, as a tragic response to her hamartia. The novel ends without the readers finding out whether the anonymous murderer was an Islamophobe, a xenophobe or ‘a Wahhabi offended by a woman playing a public role’ (333), but leaving them with a strong accusation against the press corps in general and Alyssa Spier in particular, as the one who exposed the young Bangladeshi woman to danger. Asma’s useless and illogical death , replayed by television networks over and over again, induces Sean to abandon his fight against the garden, but also Khan to give up and withdraw his project from the memorial competition, for he ‘had wanted to unite East and West , and he had—against him’ (354).
In the end, it comes down again to the media . They started and ended the conflict of a novel that speaks of Muslim otherness without traces of Islamophobic passion, a novel which tries to illustrate the idea that not all Muslims are the same. The submission remains illusory, as the two Muslim characters refuse to submit, each in their own way. The pun in the title remains unresolved. Muslim otherness , however, was not an illusion in post-9/11 America and is not an illusion in fiction , either.
I Am the Other: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist
The first three authors featured in this chapter play stereotypically and ‘Orientalistically’ on Muslim identity , their readers’ response varying from blunt accusations of Islamophobia , in Amis and DeLillo’s case, to either lauding or critiquing the New York Times-esque liberalism and understanding of multiculturalism, in Waldman’s . The last piece selected for illustrating the concept of Muslim otherness in the context of 9/11 is written from the perspective of a narrator who has positioned himself as (an) Other . The good, the bad and… the Other. The Reluctant Fundamentalist , this soi-même comme un autre fiction , weaves autobiographical elements of its author , Mohsin Hamid , into the narrative , for the construction of an unreliable narrator who also functions as the main character . The novel has received much critical attention from the exegetes of 9/11 fiction, and certainly it is not only its shortlisting for Man Booker Prize or its 2012 adaptation into an excellent feature film what sparked their interest, but rather this switch in perspective, this looking at 9/11 from the vantage point of a minority that has been subject to prejudice and intolerance ever since. Granted, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is not the only literary work written in English by a Muslim who lives (or lived) in the West . Worth mentioning in this respect are also Brick Lane by Monica Ali (2003), Londonstani by Gautam Malkani (2006), Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2007), Kia Abdullah’s young adult fiction, Life, Love and Assimilation (2006), and the play Back of the Throat by Arab -American playwright Yussef El Guindi (2005). I have taken the trodden path of discussing The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and not any of the other texts mentioned, in the context of Muslimhood as otherness in 9/11 fiction , because it allows, besides the obvious commentaries on profiling in the wake of 9/11, and, therefore, on the Muslim persecuted by an allegedly Islamophobic West , an elaboration on Occidentalism . A caveat is in order at this point, namely that Occidentalism is not used in the extremist sense of the Gharbzadegi coined by Jalal-Al-i-Ahmad (see above), but along the lines of the postcolonial view which holds that ‘decolonisation will not be complete except after the […] transformation of the observed in an observer’ (Hanafi 1991 qtd. in Esposito and Voll 2001, 88). Hamid actually remarks in an interview that ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist […] would be a look at America with a gaze reflecting the part of [him]self that remained stubbornly Pakistani’ (Hamid in Solomon, The New York Times 2007). No longer an observed, he becomes, in a way, a colonist of the West , which he admits to observe from his innate Eastern position, despite his wes
ternisation (reflected in his studies in the US, his writings in English, his British citizenship and his identity as a global citizen in general). In many respects (though not in all), Changez, the narrator and main character in the novel , is constructed as Hamid’s alter ego. Although this autobiographical stance indeed validates its description as being deterritorialised (in point of global citizenship rather than uprootedness)/hybridised/westernised, it may also hint, conversely, at the author’s awareness of his otherness.
The Reluctant Fundamentalist plays upon readers’ expectations, starting from the title, which employs a word—fundamentalist —that has been firmly fixed in its negative, threatening connotation through media overuse, despite its original meaning, that of strict abidance to religious rules. Fundamentalism has been defined as ‘the belief that there is one set of religious teachings that clearly contains the fundamental, basic, intrinsic, essential, inerrant truth about humanity and deity’ (Altemeyer and Hunsberger 1992, 118 qtd. in Kunst 2014). However, in Hamid’s novel , the word has a double function. Firstly, it is a wordplay based on the lexical relation between fundamentalism and fundamental(s), as the narrative allots a great deal of time and space to the main character’s employment in a corporation whose CEO teaches his newest acquisitions to ‘focus on the fundamentals’, that is, on ‘the fundamentals of management consultancy with its mesmerizing promise of rich rewards in return for the expediting of employee casualties in the pursuit of Mammon’ (Morley 2009, 90). It may be a subtle critique of the American ‘fundamentalism’, in the sense of its strict abidance not to religious, but to financial rules. The second function, as already stated, is that of making the readers expect ‘to read about the forces that drive the central character and narrator, Changez, into the arms of a radical Islamist terror cell somewhere’ (Morey 2011a, 139). In fact , I recently had the chance to see how the paratextual ensemble of the Penguin edition cover artwork acts upon someone who has no idea what it is about. The cover features an arched entrance of a mosque which frames a man dressed in white looking at Manhattan , the author’s name printed in large type, and the title. These elements combined made a friend who entered my office and saw the book on my desk exclaim: ‘Oh, I don’t think I like this!’ Yes, despite the warning contained in the old saying ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’, it is exactly what we tend to do, both literally and figuratively, and Mohsin Hamid has spent long enough in the West to know that.
The character’s name, Changez, also puts the readers and critics on the wrong track. It has been erroneously interpreted by Western critics as symbolically hinting at his change of heart towards America , despite Hamid’s explanation that the name is a transliteration of the Urdu variant of Genghis-Khan, which, considering the latter’s attacks on the Muslim Arabs, would constitute ‘an odd choice of name for a Muslim fundamentalist’ (Elia 2012). Changez ‘does undergo a political awakening, but this has nothing to do with some atavistic hostility to modernity, instinctive recoiling from western materialism and immorality, anger at global capitalism or any of the other default positions attributed to Islamic radicals by western politicians and media’ (Morey 2011a, p. 139). An authority in the field of Muslim representation , Peter Morey co-authored the seminal Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11 (2011) and co-edited the volume Culture, Modernity and Diaspora in Muslim Writing (2011); consequently, he is difficult to argue with, but his statement that all the evils Islamic radicals have attributed to them stem from ‘western politicians and media’ still needs commenting upon. The section entitled ‘Occidentalism as an Eastern Construct’ provides examples of Oriental thinking about the West which flagrantly contradict the idea that all that pertains to Islamism and radicalism (emphasis on –ism) is just a Western construct. That hostility to modernity, immorality or global capitalism do not customarily appear in Muslim writings in English, but only in translations, can be seen as a result of the authors’ hybridity and embrace of Western values. Indeed, in Hamid’s case, one cannot speak of his character developing into an Islamist fundamentalist—which would have made this novel predictable—but rather of misleading narrative strategies, as well as of a clever subversion of the stereotypes and prejudices against Muslims in the West.
Based on a rather obsolete narrative formula, the dramatic monologue, which calls to mind great poems of the nineteenth century written by Tennyson, Browning or Matthew Arnold, or the twentieth century’s Prufrock by T.S. Eliot, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is one of the pieces of prose which employ this form, generally relegated to poetry in the past. The reader is made party to a monologue that unwinds like the one imagined by Albert Camus in The Fall. Even the premises are similar: in a bar, except the bar is now in Lahore instead of Amsterdam, with an unnamed stranger of whom the reader learns only that he is an American , as Changez, with his substantial experience of one who spent four and a half years in the country, easily identifies him not by his clothes, skin colour, short-cropped hair and athletic build, but by his ‘bearing’. Although it is not meant as an insult (Hamid 2007, 2, henceforth, RF), this stereotypical reference to the American attitude is just the first in a long line of critiques of America . The American’s lines, omitted from the conversation, are rendered in the Pakistani man’s speech: ‘yes, you are right’, ‘what did I think of Princeton?’ (RF 3), and his presence is made apparent only by the use of markers of the second person throughout the narrative discourse —‘as you can see’, ‘if you will permit me’, and so on. The American interlocutor’s silence could be synecdochally interpreted as a silencing of America , a way of asserting that America should not have a say in the South Asian territories. This is not subject to interpretation, since Hamid admits it openly. When asked by a New York Times interviewer ‘why did you choose to silence the American?’ he replies that, for him, ‘in the world of media , particularly the American media , it’s almost always the other way round’, and the Muslims who are heard ‘mostly seem to be speaking in grainy videos from caves’ (in Solomon, The New York Times, 2007). This reference is most probably to Osama bin Laden, whose videos were broadcast by the Western media with an obstinacy which prompted some adepts of conspiracy theories to regard them as fabricated so as to keep the face of otherness in the public eye. It is relevant that the novel is set during the war on terror , which brings to mind the many American interventions in the region, deemed unjustified by the narrator:I reflected that I had always resented the manner in which America conducted itself in the world; your country’s constant interference in the affairs of others was insufferable. Vietnam, Korea, the straits of Taiwan, the Middle East , and now Afghanistan : in each of the major conflicts and standoffs that ringed my mother continent of Asia, America played a central role. (RF 177)
This silencing of America , in correlation with the plot development, could lead to the assessment of The Reluctant Fundamentalist as an anti-American piece of fiction, but that is just one side of the story. The other , much more poignant, is that this anti-Americanism is born from resentment, from being othered by a civilisation which, at least in theory, is the place of reference for ‘the dilution of alterity and the absorption of transculturation’ (Bhattacharjee 2015, 5). The story framed by the conversation or, better said, recounted by Changez, is simple, linear and easily narratable. Criticism generally classifies Changez an unreliable narrator on account of the one-sidedness of his story, which ‘performs the archetypal novelistic trick of taking us inside the head of the character but, in so doing, refusing the normalizing consolation of a dialogue’ (Morey 2011a, 139), on the degree of formality of his too educated language, and on his initial statement—‘I am a lover of America’ (RF 1). This statement is, though, contradicted afterwards up to the point when the ‘lover of America’ becomes an advocate of ‘disengagement from your country by mine’, persuading his students to participate in ‘demonstrations that the foreign press would later, when our gatherings grew to newsworthy size, come to label anti-American’ (203). Nonetheles
s, although the 200-odd pages between these two statements may indeed be unreliably narrated and one-sided, they may also be plausible and reflective of a reality outside the text which had (or has had?) a negative impact on Muslim Americans after 9/11. Changez , a young man from Pakistan, is granted a scholarship at Princeton, one of the Ivy League universities, which he idealises: ‘I have access to this beautiful campus, I thought, to professors who are titans in their fields and fellow students who are philosopher-kings in the making’ (3). Princeton is America on a small scale, with its pragmatic and effective system of sourcing and evaluating students from all around the globe, ‘until the best and the brightest of us had been identified’ (4). Compelled by the duty to ‘contribute our talents to your society, the society we were joining’, the young Pakistani makes good on his part of the deal and graduates with honours, ‘without having received a single B’ (4), landing a coveted job as a financial analyst at Underwood Samson, a corporation whose initials are self-explanatory. He travels to Greece alongside his Princeton peers and falls in love with Erica, whose name could be interpreted as an allegory for (Am)Erica (Morey 2011a, b, 140). Her Americanness is emphasised by reference to contemporary American icons: ‘in relationship to the contemporary female icons of your country, she belonged more to the camp of Paltrow than to that of Spears’ (RF 25)—bridging popular culture and fiction in order to construct an authentic temporal framework of the early 2000s or, perhaps, to subvert realism by resorting to symbols of simulacra, thus contributing to the accentuation of unreliability in the narrative.
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