I had just recently read Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist in my ASTU class at UBC–a course that incorporates reading and writing skills. Through Reluctant‘s narrative, Hamid smoothly incorporates trivial concepts such as “Islamophobia” and “Anti-Americanism”, initiating a conversation into topics rarely discussed. Especially by putting 9/11 (with concentration on the attack on the Twin Towers in New York, specifically) in as part of the backdrop, Hamid creates a unique story that questions one’s values, loyalty, and ultimately one’s identity.

While discussing the book, me and my classmates were asked whether or not we thought the book was anti-American. This of course–like many other things–made me have to take a step back and ponder in my over analytical mind. What exactly, does it mean for something (or someone) to be anti-American? Can it be as simple as having essences of hostility and resistance towards American values and beliefs? Or is it sometime much deeper?

Being anti-American is–evidently–seen in a negative light. Particularly after 9/11, strong notions of nationalism and Islamophobia were present within American culture. Now although I am by no means trying to degrade the horror that 9/11 brought (and the potential danger that terrorism can bring), many debatable questions continue to run through my mind. One question, for instance, is that if anti-Americanism is anything that resists America and its values, then does that make many Islamophobic aspects of the American culture anti-Islam? And if so, who has the authority to put one “anti-view” over another?

In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, one section of narrative particularly shocked me. While Changez was talking to the man, he claimed that terrorism was–presumably by the West–“defined to refer only to the organized and politically motivated killing of civilians by killers not wearing the uniform of soldiers” (Hamid, 178). The West sees their uniformed soldiers as the “good guys”–the ones fighting terrorism and the “evil”. But what I found particularly astounding with this quote, was the implications of America as the “evil”–that to the many countries and states that America occupied or fought against, it is the uniformed soldiers that are seen as the terrorists.

Even though our first thoughts to this concept may be that it is clearly anti-American, I believe that we must move past some of the “walls” that blind our judgments. Or more specifically, the portions of nationalism that dehumanize the lives of the foreign. Because even though there might be parts of life that can be categorized as “right” and “wrong”, I do not think that there can ever be a complete Manichean understanding in the world–that there can never be a concrete, universal line between what is considered “good” and what is considered “evil”.

For if both sides of a conflict are considered “evil” by the opposition, then who really is the “evil” one?