[ Author: Moshin Hamid
[http://www.amazon.com/dp/0151013047 Amazon]

First of all, let me get the obvious out of the way. The main character and narrator of the story is not really a fundamentalist. He’s just a guy, and doesn’t claim any strong religious or moral beliefs (as we might automatically associate with that particular f-word). He seems to be using //fundamentalism// (which I believe is mentioned nowhere but the title, and so that could have just been something slapped on by the publisher as an attention catching sales device, in which case the title is as much misleading as perhaps an outright lie, although there are plenty of meanings that can be ascribed to the word, which just means, literally, “pertaining to basics”) to mean “a longing for home, and for one’s family, despite the lack of prosperity and limited opportunities therewith”. When I think of the colloquial meaning of “fundamentalism” I think of closed-mindedness, simple-mindedness, a fear of newness or of anything which challenges existing belief, a clinging rigidity to existing belief in an often irrational way. So he’s not what I’d call a reluctant //fundamentalist// because fundamentalism has absolutely nothing to do with anything in the book; he’s just a successful hard-working man who’s homesick and feels guilt at his success because his family is in danger, and he’s reluctant to give up his world of prosperity, although to him it comes with a price, to go be with his family.

The vehicle for the story is somewhat novel, which is refreshing, but this also allows it to be thoroughly condescending: The narrator (the so-called “fundamentalist”) is telling his story to an American tourist visiting Lahore, a city in Pakistan. The two are initially strangers, and we, as the tourist, do not have a speaking role anywhere in this tale. The narrator, a pleasant young Pakistani man named Changez who attended Harvard Business School and through hard work and determination aced just about all there was to be aced, intersperses his tale with a couple paragraphs at the end of each chapter in which he comes back to the present in a Lahorean cafe and offers us tea, an ordered meal, or a local delicacy. But presumably we (the tourist) are very uncomfortable in this foreign land. Changez continually needs to reassure us in an extremely polite way that no, the waiter means no harm, that no, the bulge in his jacket isn’t a gun, that it’s perfectly safe to walk after dark //but still//, I’ll give you a ride back to your hotel because you’ll feel better, and on and on. This is perhaps a caricature of some kind of xenophobic world-unwise nervous American, brought to his knees by the reverberating sound of words like “terrorism!” and “Islamic fundamentalism!”, and here he is, in a Muslim country, and so he must be… scared! So let’s explicitly reassure him, by calling out and interpreting his every blink, and saying “ah, I see you’re blinking, you must be a little nervous, I totally understand, I would be too were I in your shoes, but I assure you, there’s nothing to be nervous about”. Over and over. Somehow, this doesn’t speak to me. Perhaps the author is implying that //we//, as Americans fumbling about in what we incorrectly perceive to be a world fraught with //fundamentalism// (as in the colloquial sense), are in fact the “reluctant fundamentalist(s)” of the title. But why “reluctant”, then? I can bang this round peg into this square hole some more, but Ockham’s Razor says that the book’s title is a marketing gimmick.

I’ll sum it up as: A coming of age story in which a young man finds out what really matters in his life, against a distant backdrop of political events following the 9-11 terrorist attacks, and a not-so-distant backdrop of his tangled love affair with a depressed young woman. Reluctance, I’ll give him that, but not fundamentalism. And the story’s condescending, somewhat moralizing tone didn’t add anything, but didn’t detract from the enjoyable aspects of the tale.

I was expecting a little more from this book, but it was a fast read and hard to put down, so I won’t complain.