As we learn more about Richard Reid, I highly recommend the movie My
Son the Fanatic. I was lucky enough to have had dinner with Hanif
Kureishi last year. While most people I know were disappointed with
the movie and Kureishi's dark and immoralist vision--he's too
Westernized for some--I found the movie quite compelling.
In the face of his son's grotesque fundamentalism which at least to
me was subtly depicted in some sense as a horrific reaction to the
paternalism of his white fiance's family , the father becomes a
fundamentalist liberal in some ways. He seems unaware of any reason
why the liberal beliefs which he espouses would ring hollow to his
son. The movie is from the father's perspective; he is
sympathetically portrayed as his fanatic son assaults his liberal
beliefs in ever more violent and hateful ways. Kureishi does seem to
have got wrong the nature of the fundamentalists' beliefs, however.
They now seem to have had bigger goals in mind than the burning down
of a house of prostitution.
Rakesh
