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

My Son the Fanatic is a film that addresses the cultural conflict of both Moslem integration in into atomic number 63 and English culture, as well as the carnal k at presentledgeship that arises between a father and his Muslim parole when the child grows up to become an Islamic fundamentalist. (Udayan Prasad, 1997, England screenplay by Hanif Kureishi) A Pakistani cab driver in a Northern English town has an affair with a prostitute and chauffeurs her and her colleagues to make extra 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 argon tested.This film completely tests the conflict that exists with Islam encountering the European mankind by means of migrations and cultural development. Kureishi reveals the core conflict of the reality of English sexual transmutation of the 60s encountering Islamic sexual regression of the present era. In the New York Times article My Beautiful London, author Rachel Donadio, notes, whizz of the most revealing insights into Britains recent social history comes primal in My Son the Fanatic, Hanif Kureishis tender and darkly prescient 1997 film.Its morning in an unnamed city in northern England, and Parvez, a worldly Pakistani immigrant taxi driver brilliantly portrayed by Om Puri, watches Farid, his increasingly devout college-age son, sell his electric guitar. The essence of this cultural conflict between Islamic and Western English culture can be seen in both in how the filmmaker and the central character, the taxi driver Parvez and his son Farid, be raised. They are both brought up by mullahs and nuns alike which reveals the complex nature of multicultural issues a Muslim immigrant office encounter living in Europe.The potential for plat 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. only when hard-line views might modify as they c ome into contact with other ideas. That was the essence of effective multiculturalism not a superficial exchange of festivals and foods driven by liberal guilt, but something else entirely an encounter with human desires in all their complexness. Higson poses the question in his article The Limiting Imagination of National motion picture, When is a movie house national?, asks Susan Hayward (1993 1). As if in answer, Crofts delineates several different types of national cinema that have emerged in different historical circumstances (1993, 1998). They have performed quite limpid functions in relation to the state (Higson, p63). Hanif Kureishis work My Son the Fanatic fits this description exactly. The Film 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 product of National Cinema, as Proclamations of national cinema are olibanum in part one for m of internal cultural colonialism it is, of course, the function of institutionsand in this case national cinemasto pull together diverse and contradictory discourses, to provide 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 composed of literal translations of Arab tribal customs and ancient Muslim traditions 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 pursuit 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 collide European cultures poses on those beliefs. Farid sees no way both ways of life can exist together. Likewise, 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-imposed on a post-sexual revolution present. Kurishi points this intergenerational drama out as ironic when he says, It perplexed me that young people, brought up in secular Britain, would turn to a form of belief that denied them the pleasures of the nine in which they lived,(Donp.7 he goes on to pinpoint 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 been to drive out religion and to produce a secular soci ety in which men and women make their own values because morality is gone. Then shortly radical religion returns from the Third World. How can you not laugh at that? How can you not find that a deep historical irony? This irony Kureishi speaks of is the main theme of the film.In Richard Dyers essay The washrag Mans Muscle, he talks about stereotypes that have been enforced connecting as outlying(prenominal) back as the Greek era, and that now dominate film and television basically promoting the superiority of white masculinity. Body hair is animalistic hairlessness connotes variant 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 do as if to rape her close-ups contrast Herculess smooth, hairless muscles with the hairy limbs of this racist archetype.(Dyer) Here Dyer points out how the uppermost essence of masculinity is e quated with shaven 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 simulacrum of the world in whichA state agency for assessing public religious schools had given a top rating to a Muslim school that was advocating a return to the Caliphate the interior minister at the time, Jack Straw, came under fire for suggesting that it might be difficult for a community-relations functionary to meet with constituents who wear a full veil 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 consider 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 r eplied. Theyre safe 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 move 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 potent with cultural complexity and relevance.The film speaks volumes about current issues facing the Western 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 job of providing authentic interpretation for a conflict that is undyingly relevant and prevailingly influential in todays socioeconomic and political climate. stimulate CitedBordwell & Thompson Film History 2004 Donadio, Rachel My Beautiful London New York Time s 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 Relationship 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.