A review by cincrisis
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

4.0

Quick but powerful. Despite the title, this is a call for pacifism of sorts. It is also a call to recognize one's own privilege—the luxury of even a basic standard of living in America (and the blind luxury of peace on one's homeland, for that matter). Hamid writes in a way to make the reader both uneasy and sympathetic—the narrator feels at once foreign and intimate. A story told through an imagined dialog, he provokes a series of discomfiting questions in the minds of his readers. How do we value life? How does our willingness to turn a blind eye to America's interference in foreign affairs—especially those in the Middle East—in order to safeguard our own sense of comfort amongst all our material riches impact not just the rest of the world, but our own lives—our own sense of reality and values? Especially in the wake of the recent US elections, this should be required reading for anyone who wishes to consider themselves unsheltered and "engaged" with the rest of the world.