My Son The Fanatic By Hanif Kureishi

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Hanif Kureishi:”My Son the Fanatic” The teenage years are never easy. It is a time when you try to find your identity and try to find out who you are. It is a time of experimenting and trying out things. Some people begin to rebel against authorities others start to do drugs and others find groups of people whom they can with. In Hanif Kureishis’s short story “My Son the Fanatic” from 1997 we follow a father who’s son is in the middle of this. His situation as a teenager is just made more complicated by the fact that they are a Pakistani family who has immigrated to England. Though his father is very well integrated, the boy seeks back to his roots in Pakistan and begins to study the Koran. As the title tells us, it is a story about how the father tries to handle that his son is getting more and more fanatic. In the following I will analyze and discuss the text focusing on religion and the boy’s opinion about his father’s way of life. Moreover, I want to discuss how the boy changes and how it effects his father. In the short story the son, Ali, becomes very religious. Though he has grown up in England and never been outside the country, he still looks at the West with despise. Somehow he has been twisted into the fanatic Islamic way of thinking and so he sees the West as a “sink of hypocrites, adulterers, homosexuals, drug takers and prostitutes” (p. 98 l. 14-15). It is the sort of thinking that is written in the Koran and that he hears in the mosques. As a result of this Ali socializes with the Middle East in an anti-west kind of way. In many of the statements he comes with about his father’s “wrong” lifestyle, he talks about “our people”, for example, he says that “all over the world our people are oppressed” (p. 200 l. 31). The father is not sure who he means when he says “our people”, but it is clear that he means Islamic people from the Middle East,

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