{"id":42,"date":"2016-05-02T16:20:35","date_gmt":"2016-05-02T16:20:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.harvard.edu\/exploringislamicart\/?p=42"},"modified":"2016-05-03T13:47:17","modified_gmt":"2016-05-03T13:47:17","slug":"conflicting-identities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/exploringislamicart\/2016\/05\/02\/conflicting-identities\/","title":{"rendered":"Conflicting Identities"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mohsin Hamid\u2019s book entitled <em>The Reluctant Fundamentalist<\/em> profiles the identity crisis of Changez, a young man from Lahore, Pakistan who is a successful businessman on Wall Street when 9\/11 happens. Attending Princeton and securing a top-notch banking job, Changez \u2013 an immigrant \u2013 appears to be living the \u201cAmerican dream.\u201d \u00a0However, after the 9\/11 attacks, his identity in The United States changes drastically. The film, directed by Mira Nair, visualizes this change by showing Changez being strip-searched at an airport and tormented in his workplace by his co-workers.<\/p>\n<p>The movie talks about how American patriotism became a way for people to protect themselves from the terrorist attacks. Hamid sums it up by saying \u201csmall flags stuck on toothpicks featured in the shrines\u201d (p. 79). The overwhelming imagery of patriotism in New York City is coupled with thoughts that \u201cwe are America\u2026the mightiest civilization the world has ever known\u201d (p. 79). This unification of America resulted in a seemingly all-time high of patriotism, but it also excluded anyone who didn\u2019t \u201cappear\u201d to be American, such as Changez.<\/p>\n<p>For the final week\u2019s blog post, I decided to do a drawing that shows Changez\u2019s identity conflicts profiled throughout both the movie and the book. Changez \u2013 in color \u2013 is standing in between half of an American flag and a Pakistan flag, which are both black and white. The black and white nature of these flags hints at the \u201cus vs. them\u201d sentiment highlighted in both the movie and the book. In the United States, Changez\u2019s identity is really black or white \u2013 he is Pakistani or he is American, as if the two are mutually exclusive.<\/p>\n<p>Is it good to be different? In our increasingly globalized society, identities are forced to overlap. Yet there still remains to be a taboo nature of being Muslim in America. In order to work towards a more unified world, we must try understand why people are different, and understand how these differences can in fact strengthen globalized cultures.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.harvard.edu\/exploringislamicart\/files\/2016\/05\/IMG_6441.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"3264\" height=\"2448\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mohsin Hamid\u2019s book entitled The Reluctant Fundamentalist profiles the identity crisis of Changez, a young man from Lahore, Pakistan who is a successful businessman on Wall Street when 9\/11 happens. Attending Princeton and securing a top-notch banking job, Changez \u2013 an immigrant \u2013 appears to be living the \u201cAmerican dream.\u201d \u00a0However, after the 9\/11 attacks, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7962,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/exploringislamicart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/exploringislamicart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/exploringislamicart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/exploringislamicart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7962"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/exploringislamicart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/exploringislamicart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/exploringislamicart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42\/revisions\/48"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/exploringislamicart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/exploringislamicart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/exploringislamicart\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}