Years later, I thought of this Dominican family again. Muslims were never “the Other” until the American media and my own ignorance, briefly, convinced me that they should be. The idea that I should fear or despise someone for following Islam was utterly foreign to me until 9/11, which I watched on television at home in Dominica. There were few Muslims in Dominica, the island I grew up in, but there was one well-known Muslim family, well-known largely because they had opened a famous store for electronics in our capital city simply called “The Muslim Store.” I went to the shop every so often as a child with my mother, and, aside from the name of the store and the fact that the male employees wore gray or black thobes and that once in a while I saw women near the store in hijabs or niqabs, I never saw the store-owners as anything particularly different from anyone else the family there just seemed like so many other families in Dominica, a part of the eclectic mix that made up the island. We can shape events, and, perhaps more importantly, events can reshape us, can recreate us, like impulsive gods, in their own image.
Here is a novel that resists a single, moralistic interpretation instead, how one reads the ending largely depends on what one assumes about Pakistan and America. While hardly the only novel to address 9/11, terrorism, and religious tensions, it is certainly one of the most accessible books to do so. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, to me, is a novel we should read, or reread, in 2016 as much as in 2007. All of this he tells to an unnamed American-the “you” of the opening, though it is also, of course, perhaps aimed at “assisting” American readers more broadly.
Changez is not a practicing Muslim-Hamid goes as far as to suggest, in an article in The Guardian, that Changez may be an atheist-yet everyone perceives him as Muslim due to his ethnicity and place of birth, which results in Changez having to take a series of major, unexpected steps. Later, Changez, who has begun to feel welcome in New York due to the city’s ethnic diversity, witnesses 9/11 on television while on a business trip in Manila, and his life abruptly changes.
Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America.” So begins Mohsin Hamid’s Man Booker-shortlisted The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a novel which follows the transnational journey of Changez, a young man from Pakistan, as he leaves Lahore and becomes a successful businessman in New York City. “Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. This year I find myself thinking of the opening lines of a novel published in 2007.
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