Deconstructing Terror: Interview with Mohsin Hamid on The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Abstract

Mohsin Hamid is a Pakistani novelist who holds British citizenship. He is the author of Moth Smoke (2000) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007). Hamid's first novel was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist became an international best seller. It was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award. The Guardian selected it as one of the books "that defined the decade" ("What We Were Reading"). The story of an ambitious Pakistani immigrant disenchanted with American life after 9/11, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a significant literary intervention in both form and content. You have characterized the immigrant, particularly yourself as ami it is a characterization that contains both freedom (not being constrained by notions of belonging) and abandonment (no one wants the mongrel) Well, first of all I intended a mongrel in a positive sense. Obviously a mongrel is a mixture of what otherwise would be pure breeds. I like the word mongrel because it generally has the connotation of being bad and inferior to a purebred dog. And again I think the word is actually appropriate now, and I would apply it to myself, because it does seem that these sorts of hybridized identities are under attack. It is harder to be someone with a Muslim-sounding name coming; into the John F. Kennedy Airport, and it s also hard to be someone with avowedly secular politics and liberal values writing in Pakistan. The mongrel identifier is something I would embrace actually, and I don't think it's at all impossible to be a mongrel--in fact, I think most people are mongrelized. But my case is more obviously so than many others. If you come from Lahore, which is thirty kilometres from the border of India, there is clearly a blurring that takes place. A bit of blurring that there would be in Peshawar, which you know is a hundred kilometres away from Afghanistan. In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, you write that Lahore is the last outpost in an unbroken series of Muslim habitations, or Muslim states, thus connecting it to something larger than the Pakistani state. Yet, when Changez goes back to Pakistan and the tension builds with India after the attack on the Parliament, the narrative is also situated as very local and not just a hybrid free-floating mongrelized voice. Some of the ways in which Changez feels are very local, very specific. Well I think Changez is a mongrel who resists his mongrelization. I personally don't, so the quote you quoted me as having said would apply to me, but it may not be what Changez may say about himself. Although he does realize in the long haul that it is very difficult to re-excavate the Pakistani identity for him, yet he is someone who reflects on his mongrelizing identity as I think many people do. I think mongrelized identitie5, when rhe world around you is nurturing, supportive, etcetera, can be more easy to embrace and more difficult when things are hostile. An article by you in the Independent is rather positive about the pledge of allegiance that Britain, following the United States, has included in its citizenship ceremony. I wonder what you thought about when writing, and whether the history of the Brick Lanes and the Muslim ghettos of London or the history of colonialism play into that. And, of course, now you live in Lahore as a Pakistani-British national. Have your views of citizenship and its privileges changed? Well, you know, I am somewhat agnostic about the notion of citizenship. I don't deny that it has meaning and that it is a thing of signifiance, but I don't solely purport to understand what it is, or even entirely believe in its existence. When I think about myself, I am a citizen of the United Kingdom, a citizen of Pakistan, but not a citizen of the U.S., even though I spent more time in the U.S. than I did in U.K.. So, in some senses my identity is more American than it is British. …