School of Distance Education

The Reluctant Fundamentalist
By Mohsin Hamid
Mohsin Hamid was born in 1971 in Lahore, 
Pakistan, and moved to the US at the age of 18 to study 
at Princeton University and Harvard Law School. He 
then worked as a management consultant in New York, 
and later as a freelance journalist back in Lahore. His 
first novel was 
Moth Smoke
(2000), winner of a Betty
Trask Award and shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway 
Award. It dealt with sex, drugs, and class conflict in 
1990s urban Pakistan. It inquires the reader to judge the 
trial of an ex-banker and heroin addict who has fallen for 
his best friend’s wife. Moth Smoke became a cult hit in 
Pakistan. Writing regularly for publications like 
The 
New Yorker, The New York Times
and 
The Guardian
, 
and with internationally acclaimed novels like 
The 
Reluctant Fundamentalist
and 
Exit West
to his credit, 
Hamid has established himself as an authority figure on 
Pakistani culture and politics. Hamid’s writing really 
took off in the post-9/11 era, when the world once again 
became obsessed with the Middle East and a static idea 
of “Islamic civilisation”. This obsession, mixed with 
fascination and terror, was more than anything else a 
desire to know “the Muslim” and the possible dangers he 
could pose. 
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
stoked this 
desire and thus launched Hamid to the stature of a 
literary celebrity.

---

School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
34 
“Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I 
see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my 
beard: I am a lover of America.” So begins 
The 
Reluctant Fundamentalist
, a novel which follows the 
transnational journey of Changez, a young man from 
Pakistan. The novel begins a few years after 9/11. 
Mohsin Hamid has very intricately woven the story 
around a young bearded man, Changez who happens 
upon the American in Lahore, invites him to tea and tells 
him the story of his life in the months just before and 
after the attacks. In 2001, as he explains, Changez was 
hardly a radical, as he now appears, not from within, but 
from without. Fresh out of Princeton, Changez was 
living in New York City and working as a Financial 
Analyst. At Princeton he was one of only two Pakistanis 
in his class who did exceptionally well there. His 
indoctrination, however, was never total. Starting with 
his job interview at Underwood Samson to a post 
graduation trip to Greece with friends from Princeton, 
Changez maintains an outsider’s double perspective. On 
the trip he is infatuated with Erica, one of the other 
travelers, but is also bothered by his rich friends’ 
extravagance and the arrogance. Two things follow the 
turning point in the novel: Changez begins his 
introspection about America’s hegemony and power and 
the city he had embraced with such joy only a few 
months before begins to view him with mistrust and 
suspicion as the public mood and climate change.
The use of monologue in ‘The Reluctant 
Fundamentalist’ allows the writer intimate access to his 
central character’s mind. Not without its limitations, 
monologue is used here with great effectiveness, 

---

School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
35