The Invasiveness of Healing in Mohsin Hamid’s the Reluctant Fundamentalist

ABSTRACT

As noted by critics, sexual intimacy in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist emerges as an allegory of post–9/11 tensions. A prominent feature of the allegory is the depiction of healing as an opening for sexual intimacy. This paper demonstrates the invasiveness that healing acquires on account of the 9/11 novel’s interweaving of intimacy and terror. The focus of this paper lies on the two instances of love–making, in which injuries are put to work in ways that expose how healing potentially trespasses on the inaccessibility of others. The text’s arming of healing, which has hitherto not been accounted for by critics, is shown to spotlight the pitfalls that accompany the remedial potential of re-reading the other. As illustrated in this paper, the parallel between re-reading and the risk of healing not only reflects critically on the text’s re-presentation of healing but has an implicating effect on the reader.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The absence of mastery is vividly captured by Lindsay Balfour, who dwells on the fatal otherness that constitutes the narrative in the following terms: “[T]he stranger that will leave him [Changez] heartbroken, strip him of both worldly possession and emotional passion, and eventually get him killed” (222). Balfour examines Changez’s narration in the context of Derrida’s notion of autoimmunity, which reflects directly on différance, in that it refers to how a mortal entity, be it a living or conceptual one, harbors the potential to destroy itself through its mechanisms of immunity because it is constituted on the basis of that which undermines it.

2. For an in-depth analysis of the 9/11 novel’s critique of capitalism, consult David Gay’s “Confronting Myths of Difference: Fundamentalism, Religion and Globalization in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist”, Religious Studies and Theology 30.1 (2011): 57-70.

3. Changez, in turn, takes considerable license with Sufism, which he provocatively alludes to in relation to warfare. More specifically, he compares the meditation practices of “Sufi mystics” to the tactics of “ancient warriors” (14). In line with the text’s questioning of re-reading, this comparison shifts militancy from fundamental to unorthodox interpretations of Islam.

4. By insinuating “invasion” on the inside of healing, the text links reinforces Derrida’s reading of the history of 9/11. The philosopher likened Al-Qaeda to an auto-immune disorder because it was originally “a system of self defense”, put in place by the West, in which Muslim Mujahedeen were trained to “fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan” (Appelbaum 100), but this mechanism later turned to attacking the home body itself (the West).

5. The inside-outside feature of signification is rendered by the narrator in the context of relationships. It is noteworthy that autonomy is spoken of as an illusion: “[I]t is not always possible to restore one’s boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the autonomous beings we previously imagined ourselves to be. Something of us is now outside, and something of the outside is now within us” (197).

6. 9/11 is commonly perceived as an instance in which the “Abrahamic religions”, “properly understood” as “antithetical to violence”, were “hijack[ed]” by the terrorists (italics in original Sherwood “Binding-Unbinding” 821).

7. It is interesting that, although Hartnell sticks with the traditional (nonviolent) sense of healing, she regards the protagonist’s attempt to disrupt Am/Erica’s nostalgic longing for its European origins as a possibility of healing, or rendering the US more open to otherness.

8. In forging a parallel between 9/11 and the lovers’ rarefied connection, the use of “plane” also reflects on the difficulty of reading Islamic fundamentalism.

9. Two of the hijackers who crashed the planes into the World Trade Towers on 9 September 2011 left behind documents which likened the attacks to Ibrahim’s sacrifice to God (Sherwood, 2015 Reading the Abrahamic Faiths 24).

10. Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata (1999), featuring an African-American protagonist, draws on the Christian concept as a means of “heal[ing] the wounds of slavery” (Patton 60).

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Notes on contributors

Ayesha Iftikhar Ahmed

Ayesha Iftikhar Ahmed completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at University College London in 2020. Her main research interest is the depiction of ethical dilemmas in postmodern literature and film.