The Reluctant Fundamentalist and thoughts on fundamentalism

Mohsin Hamid's 2007 novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist revisits the notion of fundamentalism in interesting ways.

First, I feel, it uncouples fundamentalism from terrorism and takes the former as a state of mind.

Fundamentalism is consequently yanked out of the geographical or religious demesne called the "Middle East" and "Islam" respectively, and given a somewhat universal connotation.

Anyone can be a fundamentalist in thought. A fundamentalist state of mind is one which has a single belief arrived at through a systematic rejection of possibilities, alternatives, the understanding that all "truths" are provisional or impermanent and prevails till the time an experience (or what we call "reality") comes and scuttles it.

A fundamentalist state of mind is not very inclusive; it tends to exclude everything that might be challenging the single truth in which the fundamentalist mind is secure.

Why should I even say, "belief"; in his Middle East travelogue, Beyond Belief, writer V.S. Naipaul puts the fundamentalist state of mind as being "beyond" the "reach" of "belief." Belief, in an ordinary sense of the term, is amenable to reason, but the culture of irrational fundamentalism that Naipaul encounters in his conversations with modern Iranians and Pakistanis, is not amenable to change, which is a byword for reason in the book.

The Muslim subjects in Beyond Belief fundamentally cling to their truth that the West is evil.

So, the fundamentalist state of mind, I could say, is beyond belief.

In Hamid's novel, the bearer of the most rigid state of mind, is not a person or a group of people, but an entity, called the transnational corporation. The corporation is not a person, as even a legal novice will tell you, but certainly its run by a group of persons. The persons at the helm of these corporations pursue a belief--in the supremacy of the freemarket economy, of the unhindered flow of capital across national borders and of the absolute necessity of profit at the cost of all other human or non-human concerns.

The transnational corporation in the novel embarks on a series of financial "conquests" in developing nations in the name of divesting and restructuring for the sake of maximizing profits. The corporation in question advises companies that have fallen sick on how to get back in shape. To put these companies back in shape, livelihoods of workers have to be sacrificed.

So the corporation, in the grip of a fundamentalist state of mind sacrifices others' interests for the sake of profit.

An analogy in the world of persons, would be the ambitious and driven person. The ambitious and driven person, perhaps out of necessity, enters into a fundamentalist state of mind: She/he has a single truth to believe in, which is that self-progress at the material level has to be achieved at any cost, and whatever stands in the way of that progress has to be ignored or turned a blind eye to.

Ambition, As Ernest Hemingway once said, is a horrific bitch (he was alluding to the famous actress and his interlocutor in the sphere of belletre-ism). A bitch it is, but it is also a place holder for the fundamentalist state of mind.

At a more benign level, the robot is by function a fundamentalist, it will do and "think" as it is programmed to do and "think". To change it's single way of doing and thinking the entire robot has to be reprogrammed, and then the vicious cycle of fundamentalism will set in. Only when a robot is invested with "muscles of simultaneity" (author Junot Diaz's description of a complex mind), will it be able to move beyond a fundamentalist state of mind.