The forces that pull people – particularly Muslims, but people in general – between the past and the future, between tradition and modernity, and between moderation and extremism, was the subject of a lecture given by Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid in the Sanders Classroom Auditorium at Vassar College on Wednesday, April 9.
Hamid, the author of “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” which was published last year and won the South Bank Show Award for Literature, also read excerpts from the novel, which recounts a Pakistani man’s abandonment of a successful professional life in New York for a life of terrorism.
According to Hamid, the path to extremism often starts when people are unable to cope with the multiple demands that modernity places on them – as professionals, citizens, members of families, adherents of religions and cultures -– and they seek to reduce this confusion to a single, compelling allegiance.
“This notion of trying to take one’s identity and make it something simple is very dangerous,” he told his audience. “When people do that, the results are disastrous. A person who is walking in the path of complexity becomes frightened, and then chooses a single identity – and I think that is a monstrous act.”
As for the forces that would drive an individual to such severe reductionism, Hamid pointed out that they are rooted in human emotions. And his novel tries to show that these emotions are as common in Westerners dealing with their personal lives as they are in Easterners dealing with their politico-religious ones.
A central part of the plot of “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” is the tortured relationship between the Pakistani protagonist, Changez, and the American woman he is involved with, Erica, who is absorbed in an obsessive love for a boyfriend who has died. Hamid sees longing for the past as an understandable feeling which, if carried too far, can lead to pathological thinking, whether it is personal or political.
“We live in a time where someone who is still in love with someone who has died, and actively longs for them the rest of their lives, is someone that we call mentally ill,” Hamid said. “It was considered in the pre-medication era something romantic to do. But Erica is in a modern sense mentally ill. And what she has is the great illness of the 21st century – nostalgia, a longing for the past. Nostalgia is a natural thing, but when things change rapidly in the world, the impulse to nostalgia becomes very powerful, and even pathological. National and tribal nostalgia have a destructive force beyond that of the individual, and this is the root of Islamic extremism. Osama bin Laden’s appeal is a fundamentally nostalgic appeal.”
Since Hamid is also a Pakistani who has spent years in the west working as a professional, he felt obliged to pose the question himself as to how much he has drawn on his life experience to create Changez.
“Is it autobiographical?” he wondered aloud. “It’s difficult to say. Changez isn’t me. Yet I wrote about things that I know, and used them to explore someone who took a particular path that I rejected. As a novelist, I start from the assumption that all of our lives are a total mess, and proceed from there.”
Hamid said that very few people in Pakistan read novels, so he kept “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” relatively short in order for it not to seem “scary” to prospective readers. That feature seems to have won him readers, if not adherents.
“It has sold many copies in Pakistan, but what they think about it is less clear,” he said.
After his talk, the Beat asked Hamid about the prospects for U.S.-Pakistani relations in light of the events of the last year, with the position of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf now much weaker in the aftermath of the turbulence surrounding the state of emergency he declared in November and the subsequent assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and the victory of the opposition in this February’s elections.
“The most important development in the last year was the fact that the religious parties lost big in the elections,” he said. “Pakistanis resoundingly rejected the religious right. What this tells us about Pakistanis is that we don’t need to be scared of them. America is very keen to use force against the fundamentalists, but Pakistanis want to engage them in dialogue. But the important thing is that Pakistanis themselves should be allowed to find a solution.”