Essay On The Reluctant Fundamentalist

“As a practicing Muslim and a registered voter in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, am I, through the combination of my faith and my citizenship, an inherent contradiction?” . This introduction of Zayed M. Yasin’s speech held at Harvard University in 2002 describes the struggle many American Muslims dealt with after the events of September 11th. After Muslim terrorists flew two airplanes into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon September 11th 2001 the Islamic religion and its believers became the center of interest by the media, the public and governments worldwide, but especially of the U.S’s government. Many American Muslims that considered the U.S. their home country were now faced with prejudice on them, a distortion of their values and the image of Islam created by the media. Also, they had to deal with the government’s new distrust against Arabs and Muslims, which spread through the entire nation.
This resulted in many Muslims becoming victims of “public suspicion and surveillance, sweeping governments actions, hate crimes and harassment” . Six years after the events of 9/11, Mohsin Hamid published his novel “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”, which describes the influence of these terrorist attacks had on
the life of a Pakistani successfully living and working in the U.S.. Changez, the protagonist of the story, faces an identity crisis set off by the aftermath of September 11th.
This paper analyzes the identity crisis of American Muslims after 9/11 and whether or not the identity crisis of Changez can be seen as a literary example of this.
The focus of the analysis will be the second generation of American Muslims as they are mainly the ones who “seek help in understanding who they are in a new world that denounces them and their religion” . In order to understand their position in the U.S. society this paper will give some general background information about the Muslim Minority living in the U.S. Thereafter it focuses on the causes and the effects of their identity crisis. Furthermore this paper discusses the question of Zayin M. Yasin whether Muslim Americans can or cannot combine their faith and their
nationality.
After explaining the identity crisis of American Muslims the similarities and differences of their identity crisis and the one of the literary figure Changez will be examined. Besides books and Internet resources this paper will include the results of four interviews with American Muslims from age 23 to 45 to portray the topic from a personal perspective.