Muslim Speaks Back: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a Counter Cultural Narrative

Abstract

The first two decades of twenty-first century witnessed an unprecedented surge in the depictions of Islam and Muslims in the literary fiction in English. This renewed interest is understandably part of the changing perception of the Islam and Muslims after the 9/11 incidents. The fictional works that display resurgent curiosity in dealing with Islam are to be treated as intellectual responses to the 9/11 events and the resultant mounting suspicion of the members of the community, particularly in the Western mind. Besides, such portrayals often result from and amount to the growing ‘Islamophobia’ across the world. Further, the attention gained by the religion and its members in the changing global political climate can also be treated as part of the renegotiations of the discourse of Islam. Although Islam has been talked about and debated over centuries, the discourse of the threat posed by the religion and the consequential enhanced surveillance of Muslims is a post 9/11 development, and it not only created a consciousness of being consistently watched for wrong reasons among the members of the community but also occasioned in their introspective (and often defensive) repositioning of themselves as exemplified by some of their counter-cultural intellectual responses like cultural artefacts. British-Pakistani novelist, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) is a typical post 9/11 novel that affords an analysis of the aforementioned changes in the discourse of Islam. The novel, while bearing witness to the changes in the perception of the religion by the ‘insiders’ as well as ‘onlookers’, arguably attempts to contest the dominant discourse of Islam in the post 9/11 politico-cultural context. This paper is an attempt to read Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist with the objective of examining how the novelist challenges the dominant discourses on Islam and the Muslims that emerged in the post 9/11 political and cultural context.