The Character of the Fundamentalist in the Modern Novel

Since 9/11 attacks (2001), our modern world has witnessed, in the East and the West, a cultural, intellectual and religious strife that often leads to armed conflicts among different countries and nations of the world. These conflicts use religion as a pretext to achieve political aims in order to impose their policies upon those nations. As a result, a political and religious crisis has risen between the East and the West, more precisely between Islam and Christianity. Thus, new issues appeared in literature and media like fundamentalism, extremism and terrorism. This book investigates the issue of fundamentalism in two modern literary works.The first is the Turkish Orhan Pamuk's Snow, which was behind awarding the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006 and considered as one of the best novels that handled and recapitulated the current religious, political and cultural circumstances of modern Turkey. It successfully combines between good humor, sympathy and mysticism and between secular doubt and Islamic fanaticism. The second is Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a contemporary novel in its actions that revolves around its protagonist, a young Pakistani man, Changez.