From Melting Pot to Islamophobia: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Abstract

America was founded on the idea of the melting pot that guarantees success, an opportunity to prosperity and social upward regardless of race, religion or status at birth. After the events of 9/11, the idealized notion of the melting pot was abandoned. Therefore, another version of America initiates fueled by post-9/11 xenophobia and President Bush administration’s “war on terror” launched on the pretext of promoting democracy. The Bush Doctrine, however, represented terrorism as a cause rather than an effect of the long history of Western colonization, oppression and manipulation of the Muslim World. This is exactly where the importance of Mohsin Hamid’ novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), is manifested to challenge and subvert the dominant post-9/11 discourse. In Hamid’s novel the “Other” is directly represented, not through the Orientalist discourse, but through an Easterner who changes his allegiance from a believer in and proponent of the neoliberal capitalist version of the American Dream to a skeptic and opponent of USA economic and political foreign policy. Therefore, this research argues that Hamid’s novel attempts to delineate the discourses of Islamophobia, capitalism, economic and political domination of the west, and fundamentalism in context of 9/11 attacks and their aftermath.