The Reluctant Fundamentalist

by Mohsin Hamid

function both respectfully and with self-respect in a hierarchical environment, something American youngsters—unlike their Pakistani counterparts—rarely seem trained to do.

So we learned to savor the denial of gratification—that most un-American of pleasures!—and I for one could subsist quite happily on a diet of emails such as that which I have just described.

nor the sanitized, sterilized, processed meats so common in your homeland! Here we are not squeamish when it comes to facing the consequences of our desire.

particular type of entitled and unsympathetic American who so annoyed me when I encountered him in the classrooms and workplaces of your country’s elite.

what is natural in one place can seem unnatural in another, and some concepts travel rather poorly, if at all. I

I had been raised to favor mutual generosity over mathematical precision in such matters; given time both work equally well to even a score.

Although it is traditionally associated with the end of summer and the impending arrival of autumn, September has always seemed to me a month of beginnings, a spring of sorts—possibly because it marks the commencement of the academic year.

Such journeys have convinced me that it is not always possible to restore one’s boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the autonomous beings we previously imagined ourselves to be. Something of us is now outside, and something of the outside is now within us.