“The rules of the game have changed”: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and post‐9/11 fiction

Abstract

This paper argues that Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) challenges the orthodoxies of the post‐9/11 novel that, until its publication, had generally taken the form of documents of personal trauma and loss, or recapitulations of unproblematic notions of essential cultural difference, and that took as its default position a “clash of civilizations” mindset. Hamid’s novel tells the story of the life experiences and eventual disillusionment of a gifted young Pakistani, who moves from fully interpellated capitalist “fundamentalist” and post‐political transnational subject to racially profiled (and possibly hunted) anti‐American firebrand. Yet, in doing so, it refuses to articulate the kind of confession, charting the road to Islamist radicalism, one might expect from the title, and instead employs hyperbole, strategic exoticism, allegory and unreliable narration to defamiliarize our reading experience and habitual identifications, forcing us to be the kind of deterritorialized reader demanded by the emerging category of world literature.

Keywords:

• The Reluctant Fundamentalist
• Mohsin Hamid
• 9/11
• world literature
• globalization
• terrorism

Notes

1. Novels dealing with the trauma and personal recalibration following 9/11 include Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) and, to a degree, The Emperor’s Children by Claire Mesud (2006). I would count as “Muslim misery memoirs” those narratives, often claiming non‐fictional status, which gained notoriety – and spectacular sales figures – in post‐9/11 years as exposés of the cruelty of life under Islamic political regimes; for example, Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), Asne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul (2003) and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003).

2. Michael Rothberg argues against Gray that such defamiliarizing, ideologically challenging post‐9/11 writing is already coming into existence, citing Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008) and Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall (2005) as examples.