INTRODUCTION

Until recently, Islamic fundamentalism seemed to be so remote from the western capitalist mindset that it could only be grasped through a process of othering, which emphasised difference and reinforced damaging neo-Orientalist stereotypes. Yet in the last decade or so, there has been a shift in focus. The meta-narrative of Islamic terrorism as a foreign threat emanating from non-western cultures and motivated by a barely intelligible barbaric agenda has started to give way to another story centred upon the actions of home-grown western jihadists.

Unsurprisingly, this has provoked a complex set of conflicting responses among the opinion-makers within those countries. Particularly influential in this respect are the in-depth human-interest news stories about disaffected citizens of western nations who have joined terrorist associations and moved to Iraq or Syria (such as, for example, the leads that followed the widely circulated online video of US journalist James Foley's beheading by militants of ISIS, or the Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham in 2014). Narratives about Europe's home-grown Islamist movements now include processes designed to bridge cultural fissures by familiarising viewers with the life trajectories of individuals who have succumbed to the discourse of Jihad Cool and thus been ‘led astray’. Such representations encourage identification with the terrorists, as well as revealing the identification of them by suggesting that behind the dark mask might lurk someone we grew up next door to or who we went to school with, maybe even someone who looks and talks just like ‘us’.

The anguished debate provoked by such home-grown westernised terror forms the real-life backdrop for Mira Nair's film The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012), which recounts the story of a young Pakistani who becomes a suspect in the wake of 9/11 merely because he is brown and bearded (the Oriental Other incarnate). Nair's source text, Mohsin Hamid's novel of the same name, reflects the tensions of the post-9/11 historical moment when the world seemed to be living in a permanent state of global emergency, a situation naturalised by Proclamation 7463 (‘Declaration of National Emergency by Reason of Certain Terrorist Attacks’) issued by George W. Bush on 14 September 2001. Nair wanted her film to destabilise our cultural memories of that period, and indeed the work does make a significant contribution to the politics of remembering and forgetting.