Hello everyone,
We will read Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist this week. This novel tells a story of a Pakistani man whose name is Changez. The story takes place in a cafe in Lahore, Pakistan. Changez is with an American visitor and he tells the visitor about his earlier experience. Changez was an excellent person who graduated from Princeton, and he impressed his peers in his professional life.
From my perspective, the character’s, Changez’s, experience matches with the author Mohsin Hamid. Similar to Changez, Mohsin attended Princeton, and he later worked as a management consultant. In Changez’s professional life, he is excellent performance prompted the firm to send him to Chile, where he visited preserved home of poet Pablo Neruda and he realized that he was a servant of the American empire that has constantly interfered with and manipulated his homeland, so he return to New York without finishing his work in Chile. Then, there was the September 11th attacks, 9/11. The attacks happened in New York was a tragedy, in which there were a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks by the Islamist terrorist group Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda, translated as “The Base”, was founded in Peshawar, Pakistan, which is Changez’s home country, in 1988 by Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abdullah Azzam, and other Arab volunteers. The series of terrorist attacks caused over 25,000 injuries, and substantial long-term health consequences, in addition to at least $10 billion in infrastructure and property damage. Destruction of the World Trade Center and nearby infrastructure seriously harmed the economy of New York City and had a significant effect on global markets. Changez tells the visitor that he felt pleased for this attacks in his first reaction, and he felt the suspicion towards Pakistanis after the September 11th attacks. The suspicion Changez felt was true, discrimination of Muslim Americans appeared fiercely as a result of the attacks.
Changez became a professor in Lahore after his America visa expired and returned to Lahore. He criticized the militarism of U.S. foreign policy in a widely televised interview. As they are in the care, Changez starts to realize that the visitor is very vigilant of the surroundings and he is frequently sending messages on his sophisticated satellite phone, the visitor might be an agent from the U.S.A, and there might be a gun in a bulge under his clothes. The novel ends without telling readers whether the visitor kills Changez.
Sources:
“September 11th attacks” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 19 Oct. 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks
“Mohsin Hamid” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 13 Jul. 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohsin_Hamid
Hello, Yichen Wang!
Thanks a lot for sharing your context research presentation. I loved the the parallels between Mohsin Hamid’s own experiences and those of the protagonist, Changez, in “The Reluctant Fundamentalist.” I am working on the dissertation based on this topic that I am going to complete with https://customwriting.com/dissertation-service resource. I cam tell that Changez’s internal conflict after the realization of being a servant to the American empire caused emotions the many people faced in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. The discrimination against Muslim Americans and Changez’s experience from a successful professional in the U.S. to a professor in Lahore raises many questions about identity, geopolitics, and the influnece of global events on daily lives.