Recently, our English class has been discussing master narratives – which are versions of a story that are particularly prevalent in a society- reading the novella The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Pakistani author Moshin Hamid. Briefly, I would just like to discuss the basic story of TRF before commenting on its global significance. The novella focuses on the story of a Pakistani man, Changez, and his experiances with the United States which start out as admiration and lead to a certain hostility. He moves to the United States for college, and experiances discrimination there which get heightened especially after the September 11 attacks in New York. This leads him to believe that he may not have a place in the United States. His opposition is further intensified after going abroad and learning of American policies which cause him to feel disdain for the US, such as using his homeland, Pakistan, as a proxy. The novella is centered around questioning Western master narratives about 9/11 and extremism in general.
When I was growing up, especially when I was still a young child, I had no prejudices against Muslims. Granted, I did have a stereotype of them all having beards, and wearing white robes with white headscarves, though nevertheless, I did not see it at all as a bad thing. This changed when I went to the United States at aged 10 however, I felt a certain unexplainable animosity towards them. Now, I know it was because I had internalized a master narrative at that point, but then, it was just hard to explain. I dopted the common ideas of “they hate freedom, women, and christianity” that are very prevalent in the post-9/11 western master narrative that my father quickly and successfully tried to dispell, pointing that out many family friends of ours were muslim. This shattered my stereotypes of muslims as they were normally dressed and clean shaven people who looked very much like the common person from a russophone country. The point is, that these conservative and paranoid viewpoints are represented so much more loudly than others that they are very easy for a common, uninformed person to adopt, much more so for a child. This leaves my wondering and slightly concerned for the fate of muslims not just in the West but also in muslim majority countries these strong prejudices may be enough to manifest into war mongering policies from powerful Western countries. And often, they have.
Like Changez, as I grew older, I learned more of the United States’ misdeeds globall, causing a great mistrust and opposition in me (something that readers of my previous posts may recognize). In terms of master narratives, I forced myself to reject almost any western master narrative. Many of my peers in Canada mentioned growing up with the views of muslims as terrorists but other than the previously mentioned experiance in America, I could not relate as much. I wondered if it was because I chose to ignore Western master narratives or because the Manila society which I grew up in was not focused on anti western fundamentalism. Hence, the way I understand 9/11 and the subsequent American adventurism into the Middle East and nearby countries is somewhat different from the master narrative. The War on Terror, as it is called, was a frequent topic at my highschool. Many students, including myself, questioned Bush’s, Obama’s, and Trump’s imperialistic hubris with this war as opposed to supporting it (which I hear is what is commonly taught in the West) and my own current understanding of the events is that it was a war of conquest waged by a resource hungry empire.
I do not believe at all that this version of the story is very common in the West, however, upon speaking to peers from the Middle Eastern or Muslim societies, reading posts from Middle Eastern or Muslim websites, reading news stories about protests in Middle Eastern or Muslim countries, I find that my narrative may actually represent the mastern narrative of these nations which were crushed by an american boot. In terms of TRF, I strongly believe that the novella is asking Western audiences to put themselves in the position of a person from such countries and to see where their master narratives originate from. I belive that its asking audiences to at least recognize a certain validity of the master narrative which belongs to societies that have been “otherized” (that is, viewed as distant, exotic, archaic, or possibly even less human) by their society. I do not believe that TRF asks westerners to forgive the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks or to even disregard the deaths from 9/11. Rather I believe that it asks westerners to realize that their governments’ invasions and interferances have cost many in Middle Eastern and adjacent countries their livelihoods and if not, their lives.
In this sense, I believe that TRF is similar to Persepolis. Both texts ask western readers not to view Muslims or Middle Easterners (or any non Westerner for that matter) as others or to disregard their version of stories as less significant. In Persepolis, Satrapi does this by showing that Iranians are just normal people, like any westerner while in TRF Hamid does this through portraying the effects of otherization on an individual.
A historic event that was perhaps more tragic than 9/11 was the US’s reaction to it- the invasion of Iraq. It is estimated that this invasion claimed the lives of at least 1.5 million Iraqi people. By non conservative estimates, that numbner is over 3 million. I believe that works like TRF point to the hypocrasy of Western master narratives to call Muslims terrorists, especially when those who propagate these narratives have committed crimes that are incredibly atrocious. It also relates to the broader class theme of cultural memory in that master narratives often become a part of cultural memory. What I have noticed in the West, based on both our in-class texts and other texts from online, is that there is a strong effort led by academics and people in ethno religous minorities to remove these otherizing master narratives from the West’s cultural memory and to prevent it from reappering as such. However, seeing as they are deeply embeded, whether or not these efforts will be successful is up to history to decide.
Until next time,
Aleksei