Islam in Bed with Europe in “My Son the Fanatic” Essay

My Son the Fanatic is a call for that addresses the cultural strife of both Islamic integration in into Europe and English culture, as intumesce as the resemblanceship that arises mingled with a don and his Muslim son when the child grows up to be depict do an Islamic fundamentalist. (Udayan Prasad, 1997, England screenplay by Hanif Kureishi) A Pakistani cab driver in a northern English t knowledge has an affair with a prostitute and chauffeurs her and her colleagues to make unornamented money. When his son becomes an Islamic fundamentalist and joins in an effort to clean up vice in the town, the familys loyalties and beliefs are tested.This ask completely tests the combat that h gray- piged outs with Islam strikeing the European worldly concern through migrations and cultural development. Kureishi reveals the core conflict of the existence of English internal revolution of the 60s encountering Islamic sexual regression of the present era. In the New York Times ph rase My Beautiful London, author Rachel Donadio, notes, One of the most revealing insights into Britains recent social history comes early in My Son the Fanatic, Hanif Kureishis tender and darkly prescient 1997 film.Its morning in an unk straightn city in northern England, and Parvez, a secular Pakistani immigrant hack driver brilliantly portrayed by Om Puri, watches Farid, his increasingly devout college-age son, merchandise his electric guitar. The essence of this cultural conflict between Islamic and Hesperian English culture poop be seen in both in how the filmmaker and the central character, the taxi driver Parvez and his son Farid, are raised. They are both brought up by mullahs and nuns alike which reveals the complex nature of multicultural issues a Muslim immigrant might encounter living in Europe.The potency for plot development is endless as the director notes You cant ask people to give up their religion that would be absurd, he wrote in The Guardian. But hard-lin e views might modify as they come into contact with other ideas. That was the essence of effective multiculturalism not a fiddling exchange of festivals and foods driven by liberal guilt, but something else entirely an encounter with human desires in all their complexity. Higson poses the question in his article The confining Imagination of National Cinema, When is a cinema national?, asks Susan Hayward (1993 1). As if in answer, Crofts delineates several opposite types of national cinema that spend a penny emerged in different historical circumstances (1993, 1998). They have per chassised quite distinct turns in relation to the state (Higson, p63). Hanif Kureishis subject My Son the Fanatic fits this description exactly. The photograph is historical and has an effect on multicultralism through its relevance and relation to England and the happenings of the state. In also being historical, My son the Fanatic is also a crossroad of National Cinema, as Proclamations of nati onal cinema are then in part one form of internal cultural colonialism it is, of course, the function of institutionsand in this case national cinemasto pull to arse aroundher diverse and self-contradictory discourses, to articulate a contradictory unity, to play a part in the hegemonic process of achieving consensus, and containing difference and contradiction Higson p. 139).Islamic law is formally still of literal translations of Arab tribal customs and ancient Muslim customss as well as the Koran, and quotes from the Islamic prophet Muhammad as well as his predecessors. When you get down to it, there are two types of people in Kureishis work those running toward sex and those running away from it (p. 6) In the film Parvezs son Farid notes that he is seeking Belief, purity, belonging to the past, and then he notes I wont bring up my children in this country. This represents the classh between what is now his fundamentalist beliefs through devotion to Islam and the clash Europe an cultures poses on those beliefs. Farid sees no way both ways of life can exist together. alike(p)wise, Parvez represents the embodiment of a westernized Muslim, so much so that he cant identitfy with son. In the film this conversation boils up into a conflict in which Parvez begins to beat his son repeatedly, until his son shouts to him whos the fanatic now? A major motif of the film that Kureishi mentions in his interview, is the concept of old Sharia law and the ancient traditions of the past being re-im pose on a post-sexual revolution present. Kurishi points this intergenerational drama out as ironic when he says, It dumbfound me that young people, brought up in secular Britain, would turn to a form of belief that denied them the pleasures of the society in which they lived,(Donp.7 he goes on to boom that exact issue that faces the relationship for shared for young people concerning Islam and western culture to date when he says, the West, the Nietzschean project, has bee n to drive out religion and to bewilder a secular society in which men and women make their own values because morality is gone. Then suddenly radical religion returns from the 3rd World. How can you not laugh at that? How can you not come that a deep historical irony? This irony Kureishi speaks of is the main study of the film.In Richard Dyers essay The washcloth Mans Muscle, he talks about stereotypes that have been enforced connecting as far foul as the Greek era, and that now dominate film and television essentially promoting the superiority of white masculinity. Body hair is animalistic hairlessness connotes melody above nature. The climax of Gli amori di Ercole has Hercules fighting a giant ape, who has previously behaved in a King Kong-ish way towards Herculess beloved Dejanira, stroking her hair and when she screams making as if to rape her close-ups contrast Herculess smooth, hairless muscles with the pilous limbs of this racist archetype.(Dyer) Here Dyer points o ut how the uppermost essence of masculinity is equated with shave white muscle, through its very contrast to that of hair apes, who are historically associated with blackness. He acknowledges the racist aspects of this archetype, but also gives notice to the private boys club-like tradition that has formed from this prejudice. This mentality demonstrates the epitome of the world in whichA state agency for assessing public religious schools had given a top rate to a Muslim school that was advocating a return to the Caliphate the interior take care at the time, Jack Straw, came under fire for suggesting that it might be heavy for a community-relations functionary to meet with constituents who wear a full blur an Indian woman living in England was lured back to India and murdered in an honor killing the archbishop of Canterbury said he thought England might use up making some accommodation for Shariah, or Islamic law.What, I wondered, did Kureishi make of all this? (,p. 7) There arent any answers to these questions, he replied. Theyre on the dot questions that everybody has to engage in and think about. What is it like to make a multicultural society? How far do you go in multiculturalism? Do you have parts of the country under Shariah law, for instance? What would that mean? How does that work? You have to take this stuff seriously. (p. 7) In sum, My Son the Fanatic is starchy with cultural complexity and relevance.The film speaks volumes about current issues facing the westward world today as well as those being posed by, and imposed upon the Middle East. One cant see this film and overlook the tension brewing between the two cultures of the Muslim world and the Christian European environment in which it finds itself. The film does an excellent trading of providing authentic interpretation for a conflict that is undyingly relevant and prevailingly influential in todays socioeconomic and political climate.Work CitedBordwell & Thompson look at Hist ory 2004 Donadio, Rachel My Beautiful London New York Times August 8, 2008 Dyer, Richard The White Mans Muscles in White London Higson, & Fowler, Catherine. The European Cinema Reader London New York Ptacek, J. , & Dodge, K. Coping Strategies and kinship Satisfaction in Couples. The Society for Personality and Social Psychology, 21(1), (1995). 76-84. Savran, David. (1998). Taking It Like a Man White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture. 380 pp.