They shared a common Pakistani name. They both worked in financial services, shuttling between New York and Connecticut. They both had money troubles, and they both found themselves embroiled in terrorism plots.
One, Faisal Shahzad, is the Pakistani-American accused of trying to detonate a car bomb in Times Square on May 1. The other, Shehzad Lala, is a fictional character in H.M. Naqvi’s novel about a Pakistani-American who becomes disillusioned with the United States after the 9/11 attacks.
How an ordinary American became a terror suspect
Car bomb in Times Square
Mr. Naqvi’s novel is one of two critically acclaimed works by Pakistani authors that probe how the reverberations of 9/11 left Pakistani New Yorkers alienated and angry. Both books eerily mirror the real life of Mr. Shahzad.
Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Mr. Naqvi’s Home Boy are both set in New York and feature a Pakistani protagonist working in the finance industry whose happy universe is crushed in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Both men go on to rediscover their Islamic identities.
The books are published in English, aimed primarily at a Western audience and are part of a wave of Pakistani fiction that has stirred the literary world. The Reluctant Fundamentalist was short-listed for the 2007 Man Booker Prize, Britain’s top literary award.
U.S. investigators and the public have struggled to make sense of the real Faisal Shahzad, a young man from a privileged background in Pakistan who arrived in the United States at the age of 19, went to college, secured a good job, got married, had children and took a mortgage on a house in the suburbs. At 30, he was allegedly trying to unleash mass murder on the streets of New York. In between, he is reported to have become religious while growing profoundly angry at the foreign policy of George W. Bush. His story has a fictional quality, as though he were living two lives at once – culminating in an alleged terrorist plot carried out with almost unbelievable ineptitude.
Like Mr. Shahzad, Mr. Naqvi’s protagonist divides his time between Connecticut and New York. He, too, loses his job in the finance industry and has money troubles. Then, wrongly accused of plotting terrorism and taken in for a rough interrogation after 9/11, the fictional Shehzad finds that “everything’s changed for the worse,” with New York taken over by an exclusionary American patriotism. Disillusioned, he leaves for Pakistan.
“My Shehzad could have mulled the same course of action [as Faisal Shahzad]. At that juncture, things are tenuous,” says Mr. Naqvi, who wrote the book while living in the United States. “But every unemployed Muslim man in the United States doesn’t mull acts of terrorism. … I was unemployed. I wrote a book.”
In an interview in a café in Karachi, where he now lives, Mr. Naqvi pointed out that neither his fictional character nor the real-life alleged terrorist were born and bred in the United States.
“Unlike the U.K., I don’t think you’ll have homegrown terrorism from the Muslim population in America. It’s part of the premise of the States, that you can be Chinese-American or Italian-American or Pakistani-American – if you were born in the U.S., you can be president. If you’re a Turk in Germany or Congolese in Belgium, that’s not viable.”
In Mr. Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the main character, Changez, quits his Wall Street job after 9/11. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan makes him “tremble with fury” as he finds “affronts were everywhere” around him. A love affair also goes sour. He grows a beard to mark his Muslim identity. Moving back to Pakistan, he encounters an American visitor. The novel suggests that he might attack the American, but it ends before we find out.
In a telephone interview from New York, where he was visiting, Mr. Hamid said he believes the journey from assimilated American to terrorist has three vital stages. First, some kind of personal trauma, like a broken love affair or a financial disaster, is necessary. That must be combined with a personality type that does not embrace the kind of complex identity involved in being a Pakistani-American, leading to a desire to purge oneself of the complexity and be just one thing. Finally, the new, simplified identity must feel a sense of persecution.
“All three of these things lining up inside one person doesn’t happen very often,” Mr. Hamid said. “That does help to explain why so few people become terrorists.”
In Home Boy, the protagonist explains why he no longer feels at home in New York. “There was a time when a police presence was reassuring,” he says. “But now I’m afraid of them. I’m afraid all the time. I feel like a marked man. I feel like an animal.”
