Stereotypes vs. Individuality Theme Analysis

Each of the characters in Home Fire has a unique perspective—a different way of engaging with their faith or race as well as different key experiences that shaped them growing up. Yet Shamsie illustrates how her characters are often viewed by the public and by each other not as individuals, but as representatives of their religion, gender, race, nationality, or some combination thereof: Karamat as a politically calculating “traitor” of his faith; Parvaiz as a terrorist; Aneeka and Isma as either too conservative or too immodest about their sexuality. Yet in providing backstory on each of those characters, Shamsie argues that the complexity and nuances of people’s individual experiences should be considered in understanding them, rather than just the assumptions and stereotypes others make about them.

While Karamat is understood by the public as a man who has turned his back on his community, his political philosophy and policies actually have deeply personal underpinnings. When Karamat is promoted to Home Secretary, Isma views his promotion with dismay. She receives several messages on her phone from Aneeka, including “It's all going to get worse. He has to prove he's one of them, not one of us, doesn't he? As if he hasn't already.” To outside eyes, Karamat’s tough positions are viewed as a betrayal of people like him—he is viewed as someone who has abandoned his Muslim identity for political gain. Yet throughout later chapters, particularly the one from Karamat’s perspective, Shamsie provides nuance for his stances: he has deep care for British values because his parents worked so hard to provide him opportunity there. Shamsie describes him as “a child of migrants who understands how much his Parents gave up—family, context, language, familiarity—because the nation to which they first belonged had proven itself inadequate to the task of allowing them to live with dignity.” And even though most people—including Karamat’s son, Eammon—believe that Karamat has completely abandoned his religion, this is also untrue. Karamat confesses to his son that he really believes in Islam and that “There are still moments of stress when [he'll] recite Ayat al-Kursi as a kind of reflex.” Yet Karamat has had to give up this identity out of pragmatism in order to distance himself from those he believes to still be in “the Dark Ages.” When asked if he hates Muslims, he replies, “I hate the Muslims who make people hate Muslims.” This statement provides more individual nuance to Karamat’s persona—his actions are not simply motivated by a hatred for those like him, but instead for those who make it more difficult him to identify with his own faith.

Parvaiz is similarly stereotyped—on the surface, he embodies a young Muslim man who has forsaken his own country and turned to terrorism. Yet he, too, is revealed to be acting on personal motivations rather than a desire to bring down British democracy. When Parvaiz’s death is first reported by British news networks, he is immediately placed in a category of people rather than being understood as an individual story: “the latest name in the string of Muslims from Britain who have joined ISIS.” He is immediately understood only as a terrorist, and all the narratives that the media accumulates support this idea. Thus, Shamsie illustrates how the public and the media not only form these ideas—the media actively feeds what the public already believes. Yet in the chapter from Parvaiz’s own perspective, Shamsie again shows the personal motivations behind Parvaiz’s seemingly political decisions. His choice to join ISIS is due to a desire find out more about his father, Adil, who was a jihadi. Further, although Parvaiz is a part of ISIS’s media unit, he never takes part in its violence. Instead, Parvaiz quickly realizes that he has made a horrific mistake in joining the organization and he wishes to escape it. While the details of his story don’t mitigate his involvement with violent war crimes, they do provide much more nuance to a story that the public (and readers) might assume they already know.

For Isma and Aneeka, their choices and their faith are also viewed through the lens of their gender. How they engage (or don’t engage) with their sexuality causes others to put them into a category based on that fact, despite the fact that each person has their own “versions of selective reading when it comes to the Holy Book,” as one of Isma’s professors puts it. Both Isma and Aneeka choose to wear hijabs and protect their sexuality to a degree. Isma is insistent on abstaining from sex until she is at least “able to imagine marrying someone,” even when she falls in love with Eamonn as their friendship develops. She is both teased by her professor and judged by strangers for this: when Isma meets Karamat for the first time at the end of the novel, he notes that Isma makes “no effort to look anything but plain” and is “probably a virgin.” Instead of viewing her as an individual, he sees her as someone who is simply a type. Aneeka receives the opposite treatment: she is repeatedly described in the text as beautiful, and unlike Isma, she chooses to wear makeup. According to Isma, “Aneeka had always been someone boys looked at—and someone who looked back.” She has no reservations about having sex with Eamonn but she does note to him that she wears a hijab for reasons of modesty: “l get to choose which parts of me I want strangers to look at, and which are for you,” she tells him. Yet her individual beliefs are misinterpreted when the story about her and Eamonn breaks. An article that starts with the words “Ho-jabi” carries this passage: “[Aneeka] hunted down the Home Secretary's son, Eamonn, 24, and, used sex to try and brainwash him into convincing his father to allow her terrorist brother back into England.” Though the passage carries blatant lies about what happened between them, it reveals how public perception can turn on someone based on how well they do or do not fit into expectation. This is true of most of the characters: they are unfairly judged based on the categories to which they belong, even though the underlying reality is often much more complicated and individualized. By illustrating these characters’ unique complexities, Shamsie argues that stereotypes erase the truths of individual stories and cause needless harm by lumping people into broad, inaccurate categories.