The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Starring Johar Tsarnaev

Johar Tsarnaev on the Rolling Stone cover

I spent last weekend wallowing in this Rolling Stone cover story about Johar Tsarnaev, about what a kind, charming, thoughtful, smart, sensitive, popular, wholesome kid Johar was, about how the creeping shadows of political and familial dysfunction haunt his tender mind, and turn him into an Islamist murderer. It’s a great story. It should be made into a movie.

Actually, big part of Johar’s story has already been made into a movie: The Reluctant Fundamentalist, directed by Mira Nair, based on the book by Mohsin Hamid. Reading Johar’s story helped me realise why I disliked The Reluctant Fundamentalist so much.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s protagonist, Changez Khan, is a lot like Johar. Changez too is a kind, charming, thoughtful, smart, sensitive, popular and wholesome kid. Like Johar, Changez arrives in America, assimilates successfully, falls out of love with post 9/11 America, and drifts towards terrorism. The story is well told, that drift towards terrorism feels natural, inevitable, the consequence of integrity.

However, that is where it stops. Changez’s story stops tantalisingly short of where the radicalised Islamist man-child commits murder in the name of God. Mohsin Hamid invites us to sympathise with Changez’s drift towards fundamentalism, he doesn’t show us the consequences of that drift.

Rolling Stone invites us to sympathise with Johar’s drift towards fundamentalism, to understand how his sensitivity and intelligence contributed to his alienation. But in Johar’s case, we already know the consequences. Before reading about Johar, we already know what he did for the sake of his half-baked political ideas. We know Johar murdered eight year old Martin Richards, who was cheering finishers at the Boston Marathon.

The mainstream media, the popular imagination, finds it hard to deal with the fact that a sweet kid can do evil, and therefore be evil. Evil-doers are objectified: we don’t do evil, they do. The narrative is about how a nice kid who was one of us inexplicably transformed into one of them, a monster. A lot of America interpreted the Rolling Stone cover as glamourising a monster, making a rock star of a terrorist, making evil cool. That isn’t how I read it.

To me, the Rolling Stone cover story makes obvious that evil-doers are not monsters, they’re perfectly ordinary people. Often, they're very nice people. They look like Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man, or these happy laughing Nazi officers playing with an accordion at Auschwitz, or like Johar Tsarnaev, hamming it up with his buddies before his high school prom. This doesn’t make them any less evil. But it does make them a lot more scary.

Johar (red tie) before his high school prom

Riz Ahmed as Changez Khan

Aamir Khan as the Ice Candy Man

Nazi officers at Auschwitz

Nazi officers at Auschwitz

The Boston Marathon bombings - terrorism, Islamophobia, or something even scarier?

Bomb at the Boston Marathon

A couple of twisted young men kill innocent people at the Boston marathon, and it’s called terrorism. Other twisted young men kill innocent people - at a Batman movie premier in Aurora, Colorado, or at a political rally in Tuscon, Arizona, or at a primary school in Sandy Hook, Connecticut - and there is no mention of terrorism.

What’s the difference? The Boston murderers were Muslims of Chechen origin, the other murderers were “regular” Americans. It’s easy to believe the different coverage is down to xenophobia or Islamo-phobia, and I don’t doubt there is plenty of that going on.

But there may be something deeper going on as well, which is about the way the brain processes information, something that is much harder to correct than xenophobia.

Apparently, new information coming to the brain is not absorbed directly. The brain makes sense of new information by referencing it to old or familiar information. Familiar information becomes a benchmark or a norm. New information is compared and contrasted to this familiar norm. Distinctive features of the new information are made sense of, are explained, by the attributes in which they most obviously differ from the norm. 

For instance, in the corporate world I inhabit, the "norm" is that powerful people are white men. So when a woman exhibits a particular behaviour, say domineering or bullying behaviour, the mind finds an explanation for that behaviour, in her gender. The mind thinks "She's being domineering because she is a woman. Maybe she is over-compensating, trying to get ahead in a man's world." Equally, when a woman is self effacing, the mind thinks "She's being self-effacing because she is a woman, she is the product of generations of gender stereo-typing." The same behaviour observed in a white male might be explained by his biography or personality, but not by his gender.

Critically, this habit of the mind is involuntary. Research shows that it affects passionate liberals as much as bigots, even when the passionate liberals are fully aware of this unreasonable pattern of thought. 

The same mental mechanism looks for an explanation for what happened, a cause, in the bombers' Chechen background - "they did what they did because of what happened in Chechnya". That is less stupid than jumping to the conclusion that the bombings were a part of an Islamist terrorist plot. That doesn't make it true. 

The reality is that it is almost impossible to know why what happened happened.  The mind doesn't accept this vacuum, it fills it up with a plausible story. "Islamist plot", "right wing bigotry", "misunderstood immigrants", whatever - any story will do. The stories don't have to be true. They just need to protect us from accepting that God plays dice with the universe.

God's dice