Review of "The Reluctant Fundamentalist"

 

It has been remarked that we live in a period of religious revival, evident in many parts of the world. This may not necessarily be the case in Europe, where religious observance has declined notably and where church attendance is at an all-time low, but the rest of the world paints a different picture. It may well be that religious movements cloak other grievances, and that they may well point to political or ethnic or economic conflicts that have been resolved, but it is certainly true that religion has served as a rallying point. It serves as the backbone of a program of protest against global economic development throughout many parts of the world, and it serves as one of the markers for ethnic conflicts taking place in countries such as Nigeria. It has also been conflated with a whole program of agitation and resistance to what is perceived as cultural and economic domination, and has been demonized as part of a dangerous wave of fundamentalism.

We in the United States have seen how dichotomies have been created that use religion as a marker. We are especially attuned to this in the wake of the tragic events of September 11^th, 2001. This event shocked us into the realization that we were also vulnerable, and not as inviolable as we had thought. (Were we perhaps guilty of arrogance?) It brought about a reaction that played into the hand of a group of policy experts who were categorized as neo-Cons, who it was taken, were at the vanguard of a program that sought to shatter the status quo in the Middle East and other regions in the hope that they could remake those countries in our own image. Or, as cynics would decry, as least make them more pliable to US interests. Needless to say, this didn’t work out.

We still live with the specter of terrorism, of violent action directed against innocent civilians in the name of fundamentalist movements that derive their rationale behind an appeal to history and to institutions that are based on a fundamentalist reading of religion. A common term by which to refer to these groups would be “Islamist”, and this proves to be unfortunate because it imposes a reading that fails to take into account how fractured this movement is, and how culturally heterogeneous these regions are. This is a fact that has to be stated over and over, but is seems to escape popular understanding especially in the wake of events such as the Boston Marathon bombing that was, apparently, perpetrated by two brothers of ethnic Chechen origin who had been seduced by these violent extremist ideologies. It need be asserted, over and over, that the appeal to religion masks underlying root causes. It is too simplistic to speak of “Islamism” as threat, because it is an abstraction, emblematic as it is of an impulse to demonize an immense group that can't be treated as a monolithic whole, nor dismissed as an "Other" that must be contained. (It makes me return, once again, to Edward Said's famous critical study, Orientalism, that was published several decades ago.)

It was in this context that I recently saw the film by Mira Nair, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”. It was released in 2012, and unfortunately I had not read the novel by Mohsin Hamid upon which it was based. It is a story that is compelling, one of a journey of return and re-affirmation, but also, of compassion and the wish to preserve a sense of dignity and humility. It is a compassionate story, in which we see what may be termed the taming of mercenary impulses in an effort to highlight the power of ideals. It was not, perhaps, the story I was fearing I might see, one that seems to be part of a formula popularized by Hollywood in which the brush strokes are, inevitably, very broad. It was a subtle story that was characterized by unexpected symmetry. It was all the more liberating because of this.

We see the story of Changez, a Pakistani immigrant who is the son of a famous Punjab poet who is falling behind the times in the New Global Economy. He arrives in the United States to study in an Ivy League school and, to all intents and purposes, he becomes “one of us”. He is seduced by America, seduced by the dream of unlimited opportunity and the appeal of a meritocracy that dispenses (supposedly) with all forms of inherited privilege. How could he not be? He is passionately aware that his family, espousing as they do a very modern liberal outlook, is coming under siege by aggressive ideologies, whether they be the coming of the information economy or the expression of public anger on the part of those that feel left out. He decides to follow the line of the new global entrepreneurs, the economic pioneers who are akin to modern-day mercenaries, the analogues to Mitt Romney and his firm, Baines Capital.

He manages to secure a position with a capital firm that is invested in “the fundamentals” of economic liberalism, and by liberalism I am referring to the classic conception of economic organization that eschews regulation and is instead more akin to “laissez-faire”. What happens, of course, is that they are in charge of taking over struggling companies and streamlining them to make them more efficient and profitable. It is all in the name of efficiency and the maximization of value, and Changez is very good at it. He would seem to have a natural born talent.

This lays the groundwork for an epic of struggle that one imagines would have ended with his being a spectacularly rich global financier. It takes a turn, however, with the advent of the terrorist attacks of 911, which spark a change in him so that he comes to question his pursuits.

 

Which is not to say that he wasn’t feeling any doubts before this point. It takes a great effort to slow and stop when one has been traveling at breakneck speed, and he was achieving spectacular success in his work for this firm. But, it was also the case that he was to slowly appreciate what it felt like to be the outsider, to be the object of suspicion, to be considered redundant and, in a certain way, subject to suspicion. This was what happened to him after the attacks, but the road was prepared for him before, in his interaction with the representatives of the many workers who were abstractions to him before, but he slowly came to see as persons.

Just like redundant workers faced job loss and bankruptcy in the wake of the reorganization schemes he imposed on these companies, producing as he did value for shareholders but also much suffering and despair, the events of 911 prompted a change in the culture that mirrored the impetus of the program that was carried out by his firm. He himself became an abstraction, a “foreigner”, who was subject to suspicion and who was treated with little regard. He was subject to humiliating searches when traveling through airports, and he was taken into custody and subjected to humiliating detention and threats because he, somehow, didn’t fit into the profile of what was considered safe in post-911 America. It is this reversal of fortune, this stepping through the class to see how the other side lived (by which I am referring to those who were powerless, the workers, those that were evaluated according to a merciless calculus). He was an economic buccaneer, but he was also perceived as a Muslim, and the behavior he saw, the urge to portray him as part of some essential whole, served to alienate him.

 

This turnaround reached its apex in Turkey, when he was forced to confront the nature of what he was asked to do, when presented to him through the symbol of the Janissary. These were, of course, the military corps formed by the Ottoman Empire that made use of Christian boys who were kidnapped from their families in the Balkans, and who were converted to Islam, to be used as foot soldiers against those communities from which they had originally arisen.

 

(Modern-day Janissaries)

 

It is an apt comparison, because he has himself become an instrument of destruction, defending an ideology that forced him to forget his own roots. It is also a term that is shared by all communities who have their own parallels, who see this collaboration with an ideological scheme that is destructive of whole communities as a form of collaboration. It is invested in a whole symbolic framework in Mexican history, for example, and in popular culture it assumes the guise of a discourse of “Malinchismo”, this being a reference to the Indian woman Malianali (Malinche), the woman who accompanied the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and who proved invaluable to his pursuit of conquest by serving as a translator and allowing him to lie to the Aztec leaders and deceive them.

In the movie, then, we see a reversal, one that is predicated on the discovery of a hidden symmetry. And this ushers in a new phase, as he returns to Pakistan and becomes a teacher who is known, rightly or wrongly (the audience is held in doubt), as a fiery advocate of fundamentalism. Has he become the ultimate turncoat? Is ne now collaborating with those who have kidnapped an American professor from a local Pakistani university, and is he inciting his students to join fundamentalist movements?

But all of this is predicated on the understanding of the term, “fundamentalism”, and in this way, the film draws a striking parallel. The mercenary capitalism of his investment firm isn’t that different from the fiery return to first principles that is espoused by the leaders of fundamentalism Islamic groups. They both are predicated on abstractions, on an inability to perceive the meaning and value of individual human lives. This comes as a revelation, and it is demonstrated in powerful speeches as well as in lyrics to songs and in images that have both a powerful symbolic logic as well as emotional appeal. The mercenary impulse is revealed at its core, one that bodes protracted conflict because, at its very root, these ideological schemes mirror each other.

There is an accidental shooting that occurs at the end of the film, one that was foreshadowed from the very beginning and that furthermore underscores the employment of a scheme of parallelism. The kidnapped American professor, who was not so innocent after all, is killed, but so is the friend of Changez, he who did seem to be more of an innocent bystander. Losses are symmetric, and it is the cycle of expanding and asymmetric violence that threatens to spiral out of control that seems to be the result of this new rise of fundamentalist values.

The last speech that is given by the Changez as he buries is friend is also a powerful speech, and it leaves us perhaps with an inkling of hope. As a movie, it is an exhausting journey, suspenseful and lyrical but also, one that we have seen before. Like Saul on the road to Damascus, a city that is currently enmeshed in a violent civil war in Syria that shows no sign of being settled and grows more brutal by the day, we also experience a moment of paralysis that leads us to question our fundamentalist impulses. We have our own encounter in the desert, and this movie serves to affirm our most basic humanistic impulses. 

 

 

 

 

Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2013
Copyrights ORomero 2013