The West and Islam Theme Analysis

In “My Son the Fanatic” the modern conflict between Islam and the West is embodied in the strained relationship between Parvez and his son Ali. Parvez delights in what he views as the flexibility and freedom offered by the Western culture of England. He drinks whiskey, eats pork, maintains an emotional affair with a prostitute, and scoffs at what he and his friends perceive as the hypocrisies of Islamic mullahs telling everyone else how to behave. Ali’s sympathies, however, go in the other direction. He rails against the West and Western culture for its materialism and focus on personal freedom and pleasure above all, as well as for the way that the West views Islam as both inferior and violent while at the same time oppressing and inflicting violence upon Muslim people around the world. When Parvez, in a moment of fury at the judgement levied against him by his son, attacks Ali, it is an action that replicates the Western violence against the Middle East that radicalized Ali in the first place. In this moment, Kureishi highlights the West’s own moral failings and its direct role in the radicalization of Islam that it deplores.

Throughout the story, Parvez is deeply committed to the West and what he believes is its superior culture that allows one the freedom to “do almost anything” and enjoy life’s pleasures to the fullest. Parvez delights in the materialistic pleasures of the West, from bacon, which he “couldn’t deny that he loved,” to whiskey, to his friendly relationship with the prostitute Bettina. Not only does he love the freedoms he feels he is afforded in England, but he desperately wants to abandon his former culture in favor of full assimilation into this new culture of his adopted country.

Ali, in contrast, is deeply committed to Islam, and though his beliefs are rooted in a deeply fundamentalist version of Islam, he does highlight relevant points about the impact that Western freedoms have on the rest of the world. Ali is deeply opposed to the materialism of Western culture, and this opposition is clear from the very beginning of the story when he begins throwing away possessions that, to him, represent the excess and undue attention that Western culture pays to the pursuit of individual pleasure and satisfaction. But Ali’s criticism of the West goes deeper. At one point in the story, Ali asks his father how he can love the West when the West has time and again demonstrated its hatred for immigrants, and especially those from the Islamic world. Through this question, Ali is pointing to the ways that the West inflicts violence and oppression on Muslim people through imperialism that wreaks instability in Muslim-majority countries, and also through the fury and discrimination directed at Muslim immigrants who then move to the West to escape the havoc in their home countries that the West helps create. Ali views Parvez’s desire to assimilate as “grovelling to the whites,” and as a way of reinforcing the global problems of white and Western supremacy. There is truth to Ali’s claim that “the West always thought it was best,” and aims to position other cultures as “inferior.” Parvez himself briefly admits that there is truth in some of Ali’s beliefs about the West, when he confides in Bettina that he thinks “people in the West sometimes felt inwardly empty and that people needed a philosophy to live by.” Though Parvez remains adamantly opposed to the philosophy that Ali has chosen, in this moment he acknowledges that the materialism of the West is at least in part problematic.

Parvez proves Ali’s point about the West in the story’s final scene when, drunk on whiskey and despair, he physically attacks Ali. In this action, Parvez asserts dominance over Ali through violence, just as the West does to the Islamic world. Parvez enacts just the sort of behavior and worldview that radicalized Ali in the first place, and “My Son the Fanatic” more broadly implicates the West in the creation of the fundamentalist strains of Islam that the West deplores.