The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Hina Anwar

Both the film and book version of The Reluctant Fundamentalist contained the basic plot line but were both very different. The film in particular referred to fundamentalism in terms of the corporate world where Changez had a hunger for it and Jim recognized it. Changez knew what he had to do in order to advance, he had to work hard and do whatever was necessary to succeed even if it meant taking risks and fighting with coworkers. When you think of corporate America, you think of harsh, cut throat business people. There was also fundamentalism with the Al-Qaeda trying to gain Changez’s help and support. It’s ironic how they refer to the Qu’ran and its “fundamental truths”. Nowhere in the Qu’ran does it say to kill innocent people, to not allow girls to go to school, and to hate on other religions. In the first place violence is never condoned and you’re supposed to respect the beliefs of others. There are no hidden meanings; the Qu’ran is pretty straight forward.

Changez from the beginning may have been a fundamentalist in the corporate world, or was willing to adapt to its fundamentals, but religion wise he wasn’t much of anything. He didn’t seem to pray five times a day and in the film when he visited the mosque he seemed in awe and surprised as if it had been a long time since he had been to one. Also he drank and had sex, which were also to things that are not condoned in Islam.What seemed most important to him was his career and Erica, only when 9/11 occurred did he turn back to religion.

The book and the film had many differences but I feel the most important were the ones involving Erica and the “Bobby” character. First of all Erica was a writer and she didn’t cause the death of her childhood sweetheart. She also didn’t part ways with Changez dramatically like the movie depicted; she had a mental breakdown, was institutionalized and then disappeared. I felt the film tried really hard to show the effect of 9/11 on Changez to make it more dramatic, but the book had a more subtle way of doing so. It was also weird how Changez said he at first felt a sense of pleasure when he saw the planes crash into the twin towers. What even is that? It just makes him sounded like a lunatic that’s just barely in between the line of regular person and psychopath. No normal person feels pleasure with things like that, maybe serial killers. If that was supposed to be some sort of commentary of the human mind, it wasn’t very effective.  The American in the book also did not have a name and we as the readers had no idea who he was, just like Changez. In the film he was overdramatized once again, and had more importance to the plot. I felt like having him be a vague character would be more interesting and then ending without knowing if he was going to harm Changez or not would have been more effective than a recording of Changez’s story.