The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Islamophobia

Born in 1971, Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid was educated at Princeton and Harvard, and spent over a decade studying and working as a financial analyst in corporate New York. After passing the ‘Life in the UK Test’ introduced after the 7 July 2005 London bombings to obtain his British passport, Hamid lived in London for a few years holding dual citizenship (British and Pakistani) before moving back to Pakistan in 2009. Split between two cultures which have become more and more hostile to each other, Hamid has effectively shown his own ambivalence, notably in his second novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Taking its cue from Hamid’s work, my essay wants to explore issues such as racial profiling and Islamophobia in post-7/7 Britain. A relatively recent phenomenon, such sense of suspicion and fear towards bearded men wearing ethnic clothes has become conspicuous after 9/11 and 7/7. In particular, I will focus on how Islamophobia complicates the already difficult relations between East and West by assuming radical Islam as necessarily the most noteworthy component of Muslims’ fractured identities.