Reluctant fundamentalist, eager host? cross-cultural hospitality and security anxieties in Mohsin Hamid’s novel of uncertainty

Mohsin Hamid’s second novel has been lauded as an exceptional work in the emergent canon of “(post-)9/11 literature” and has been particularly celebrated for interrogating rather than propagating the kind of reductive, binary thinking on which much political, cultural, and indeed literary discourse on 9/11 and its aftermath has often been premised. The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) has been described as a novel that “forces readers to think about what lies behind the totalizing categories of East and West, ‘Them and Us’ and so on-those categories continuously insisted upon in ‘war on terror’ [sic] discourse”;1 as a novel that “manages … to escape the Manichean tone that has sometimes defined post-9/11 Western political discourse”;2 as “a corrective to constructions of terror that are centralized around 9/11 and sees [sic] citizens of the west only as victims on the receiving end of terror.”3 In the place of such binaries, the novel purportedly offers “a unique and alternative discourse to the more commonly found expositions on contemporary terrorism and Islam.”4 The novel was an international bestseller, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, has been adapted for the big screen, is becoming a commonplace title on academic syllabi, and-perhaps most notably-has also been selected by major universities in both the United States and Britain for distribution to all of their incoming undergraduates. As well as taking as its subject matter cross-cultural encounters and cross-cultural (mis)understanding in a world that is (apparently) increasingly globalized yet increasingly polarized, The Reluctant Fundamentalist has been deemed a novel that can facilitate crosscultural understanding.