Went to see if My Son the Fanatic offered any insights into the troubled world of intra-ummah conflicts, the strictures that fundamentalists try to impose on ordinary Muslims and the ways we find to cope with them. No such luck. There was no normal Muslim to be found in this picture. Nobody I could identify with. The choices are either: 1) a drinking, whoring Muslim totally alienated from his faith; or 2) a bitter, violent, foaming-at-the-mouth zealot. The closest person to a regular everyday Muslim is a minor character, the tired old chap at the mosque who wistfully observes that the youth accuse his kind of being deficient in Islam. He is on screen for about half a minute.
The "Islam" depicted in this film gave an odd sense of disconnect with the reality that I'm familiar with: it came through in patchy, discontinuous, incoherent glimpses. Maybe Hanif Kureishi's aim was to show how bewildering this phenomenon looks from the outside, from the father's point of view. It certainly will not give the non-Muslim audience the least idea of what Islam means in the lives of ordinary Muslims. The maulvi imported from Pakistan is an odd cipher: he conveys nothing at all about his beliefs. Mostly he stays silent, but he's too superficial a character for his silence to even seem enigmatic. All he does is giggle at a televised cartoon and ask for help with immigration. Maybe Kureishi deliberately meant to show him as totally vacuous; if so, he succeeded at that. Therefore the son's impassioned conversion comes across as an entirely negative reaction to his circumstances, with little suggestion of any positive beliefs.
The most disturbing element in the film, and the one that hit home the hardest, was to show fundamentalist Islam as heavily male and harshly anti-woman. There was one moment of intense poignancy: the lad's mother being banished from the family dining table to eat alone in the kitchen. This scene was in its quiet way the most powerful and eloquent of the whole film. The other activities of the fundamentalist crew (starting a squabble in the mosque, haranguing hookers on the street) may have seemed annoying but harmless--but when they firebomb and beat up women, they become truly frightening. Why does fundamentalism always seem to come down to this--violence against women? The Taliban are a nauseating real-life example. On the other hand, we need to ask why filmmakers choose to show Islam only in the ugliest way, without any sense of its beauty and love and peace that keep bringing in so many converts. However, there is a counterpoint to this theme shown in the nasty bruises on the hooker, inflicted by the obnoxious German who hired her. Here Kureishi seems to suggest that whether it's Islam or non-Islam, no matter--all systems still come down to violence against women. Yet he never suggests any positive alternative to all this social nihilism. A point of inaccuracy: the fundamentalists are shown speaking approvingly of Ayatollah Khomeini--however, among the Pakistani fundie groups I have met in real life, like the Tablighites and Maudoodites, all Shi`ites like Khomeini are condemned as anathema.
It was impossible to feel any sympathy for either of the two antagonists in this film. Each one acted like a jerk in his own way. The son was obviously a jerk for turning so viciously intolerant--but the father, who was supposed to be the sympathetic character, was an even bigger jerk for the way he neglected his family and cared only for himself (and in nearly every scene of the film he's holding a glass of booze). The main theme of the movie was not even about Islam at all; it's about how men are jerks by nature. The only character I felt sympathy for was the neglected wife. Her husband tries to justify his adultery by crying out for "tenderness"--and yet although his wife shows that she's dying for a little affection, he only responds with cruelty. True, she gets a bit shrewish herself, complaining about missing out on the fun that the rich guy's wife is having--but is that supposed to be the whole justification for his ill-treatment of her? In the end, he stubbornly refuses to learn anything at all from his experience; when his friend and his son tell him the plain truth of his behavior, he reacts with sudden rage and beats up his son. He just holds on to his swing records and his liquor, for whatever comfort that might offer after he's gotten alienated from everyone in his life and left all alone. This film was a well-directed, wrenching study in how family members hurt one another, but its contribution to Islamic discourse was insignificant--it never came close to engaging the problem of fundamentalism in a serious way, but only exploited it as a vehicle for jerk-itude.
The "Islam" depicted in this film gave an odd sense of disconnect with the reality that I'm familiar with: it came through in patchy, discontinuous, incoherent glimpses. Maybe Hanif Kureishi's aim was to show how bewildering this phenomenon looks from the outside, from the father's point of view. It certainly will not give the non-Muslim audience the least idea of what Islam means in the lives of ordinary Muslims. The maulvi imported from Pakistan is an odd cipher: he conveys nothing at all about his beliefs. Mostly he stays silent, but he's too superficial a character for his silence to even seem enigmatic. All he does is giggle at a televised cartoon and ask for help with immigration. Maybe Kureishi deliberately meant to show him as totally vacuous; if so, he succeeded at that. Therefore the son's impassioned conversion comes across as an entirely negative reaction to his circumstances, with little suggestion of any positive beliefs.
The most disturbing element in the film, and the one that hit home the hardest, was to show fundamentalist Islam as heavily male and harshly anti-woman. There was one moment of intense poignancy: the lad's mother being banished from the family dining table to eat alone in the kitchen. This scene was in its quiet way the most powerful and eloquent of the whole film. The other activities of the fundamentalist crew (starting a squabble in the mosque, haranguing hookers on the street) may have seemed annoying but harmless--but when they firebomb and beat up women, they become truly frightening. Why does fundamentalism always seem to come down to this--violence against women? The Taliban are a nauseating real-life example. On the other hand, we need to ask why filmmakers choose to show Islam only in the ugliest way, without any sense of its beauty and love and peace that keep bringing in so many converts. However, there is a counterpoint to this theme shown in the nasty bruises on the hooker, inflicted by the obnoxious German who hired her. Here Kureishi seems to suggest that whether it's Islam or non-Islam, no matter--all systems still come down to violence against women. Yet he never suggests any positive alternative to all this social nihilism. A point of inaccuracy: the fundamentalists are shown speaking approvingly of Ayatollah Khomeini--however, among the Pakistani fundie groups I have met in real life, like the Tablighites and Maudoodites, all Shi`ites like Khomeini are condemned as anathema.
It was impossible to feel any sympathy for either of the two antagonists in this film. Each one acted like a jerk in his own way. The son was obviously a jerk for turning so viciously intolerant--but the father, who was supposed to be the sympathetic character, was an even bigger jerk for the way he neglected his family and cared only for himself (and in nearly every scene of the film he's holding a glass of booze). The main theme of the movie was not even about Islam at all; it's about how men are jerks by nature. The only character I felt sympathy for was the neglected wife. Her husband tries to justify his adultery by crying out for "tenderness"--and yet although his wife shows that she's dying for a little affection, he only responds with cruelty. True, she gets a bit shrewish herself, complaining about missing out on the fun that the rich guy's wife is having--but is that supposed to be the whole justification for his ill-treatment of her? In the end, he stubbornly refuses to learn anything at all from his experience; when his friend and his son tell him the plain truth of his behavior, he reacts with sudden rage and beats up his son. He just holds on to his swing records and his liquor, for whatever comfort that might offer after he's gotten alienated from everyone in his life and left all alone. This film was a well-directed, wrenching study in how family members hurt one another, but its contribution to Islamic discourse was insignificant--it never came close to engaging the problem of fundamentalism in a serious way, but only exploited it as a vehicle for jerk-itude.