The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Jan 24, 2025

 

The Reluctant Fundamentalist first Edition cover 2007

When Mohsin Hamid, the young  British Pakistani writer, began his second novel the demolition of the World Trade Tower by the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States had not yet occurred. He re-wrote the novel again  and again and took seven years to complete it. Ultimately, the novel turned on Changez Khan’s dawning realisation that something had changed fundamentally in the acceptability of Muslims in America after those attacks. The country would no longer be the land of his youthful dreams.

The twin towers attack of Sep 11, 2001 when airliners were flown into the towers by terrorists – the south tower is on fire and the north tower billows smoke

In  between he has a slow-burning love affair with a young woman called Erica. But she has still not come out of her depression following the grief over her boyfriend Chris, who died in the 9/11 attack. Changez loses track of Erica, but continues to think of her fondly, even after returning to Pakistan, holding onto the hope that she might one day come to him. 

When the North Tower collapsed this fire engine was damaged beyond repair — it is now an exhibit at the 9/11 Museum. Among first responders 441 died on that day

What makes Changez give up on his dreams is an eye-opening conversation he has with the head of the literary division of a company (Juan-Bautista), he has been sent to evaluate in Chile by his Wall Street company.  In a conversation he is told of young Christian boys who were captured by the Ottoman Turks in battle and then brainwashed into becoming Janissaries to work for their new masters. The implication is Changez has been similarly indoctrinated by his Wall Street firm to work against his own interests; he has become a hired gun. Juan-Bautista prompts Changez to examine his own identity and his relationship with America, which helps Changez see himself as a kind of "cultural outsider" exploited by American power structures. 

From there a transformation takes place and perhaps the poetry of Pablo Neruda one of whose houses south of Valparaiso he visits, has something to do with his deeper appreciation of his own poetic roots (his father was a poet in the Punjab).

Sumbal Maqsood of Government College University, Lahore, wrote in a paper titled Interrogating the Fundamentals of Identity: Changez’s Defining Act in the Reluctant Fundamentalist about Changez Khan’s dilemma:

“The standardized tests of America (like SAT) were traps to attract the intellectual cream of other nations, leaving the home countries deprived of brain power, while the migrants became servers of a tentacled capitalist cause. Changez realized gradually that he was just enabling the tentacles to grow more out of bounds.” 

The Reluctant Fundamentalist was adapted as a 2012 film in the political thriller drama genre, directed by Mira Nair and starring Riz Ahmed, Kate Hudson, and Liev Schreiber

The novel was later turned into a film directed by Mira Nair available for viewing free on Youtube. Many scenes are changed: Juan-Bautista in Valparaiso is turned into a book publisher in Istanbul who publishes in translation great authors from the Middle East and Asia. The book becomes more a thriller in the latter half of the film about secret CIA intervention in Lahore to rescue one of their operatives – there is no such story in the novel. In the film Changez Khan is less of a non-violent protester about American interventionism, and more of an activist goading students until he steps unwillingly into the terrorist backdrop to fundamentalism in Pakistan. Readers may on the whole prefer the novel because it leaves things unresolved at the end.

In the film Changez (played by Rizwan Ahmed, the British Pakistani actor) learns that the Istanbul publisher whose company they were evaluating, has published a Turkish translation of his father, Ajmal Khan's, poetry