My Son the Fanatic

Slate foreign editor (and, I believe, Brit expat) June Thomas points to a film that. she argues, provides clues as to how and why "apparently assimilated, British-born Muslims end up stuffing bombs into their backpacks and murdering dozens of their compatriots in the Tube and on a London double-decker bus". The film she analyzes in her piece is called My Son the Fanatic (BBC Films), written by Hanif Kureish and directed by Udayan Prasad - and, funnily enough, I own a copy.

In this engaging little film from 1997, "the British-born son of Pakistani immigrants morphs from a clothes-obsessed, cricket-playing, music-loving accountancy student into a devout Muslim who rails against the corruption and emptiness of Western society, much to the uncomprehending consternation of his father." The father, Parvez, played by the prolific and excellent Om Puri (above left), is a taxi driver (and thus near the bottom rung of English society) who lives in a seedy, sleazy deindustrialized Northern city ("not unlike the hometowns of the alleged bombers," as Thomas points out). This definitely is not England at its best. But Parvez has hopes of rapid upward mobility for his family. For Parvez, notes Thomas, "immigration to Britain represented a decision to prioritize materialism over spirituality." When his son, Farid, got engaged to a white, middle-upper class English girl, Parvez thought that his family had "made it" in England. But Farid goes on to reject the engagement, arguing "In the end, our cultures … cannot be mixed" and "Some of us are wanting summat more besides muddle. … Belief, purity, belonging to the past. I won't bring up my children in this country."

My Son the Fanatic avoids the simple black-white, good-versus-evil contrasts plugged endlessly by George Bush, and, increasingly, Tony Blair. It

is too subtle a creation to fall into a simplistic religious-belief-bad/Western-assimilation-good dichotomy. As Parvez says at the end of the film, "There are many ways of being a good man." And Parvez isn't all good. Although he is sensitive and hard-working, he is also selfish and prideful. He takes his wife, Minoo, for granted; he is unfaithful with Bettina, an English prostitute (Rachel Griffiths with a convincing Northern English accent); and he has forced his son to abandon art and music and pushed him into the practical field of accountancy. There is also something admirable in the film's presentation of young Muslims, who refuse to submit to the everyday humiliations that Parvez and his generation are subjected to. After much provocation, Farid tells his father why he broke off his engagement to Madelaine Fingerhut: "Couldn't you see how much Fingerhut hated his daughter being with me, and how repellent he found you?" As one of his contemporaries tells Parvez, the youngsters may be stirring things up at the mosque by constantly arguing with the elders, but at least they're standing up for something. "We never did that."

Perhaps becoming over-eager to find sinister clues to "7/7" in this film, Thomas notes that "Farid leaves home, stalking off with suitcases in hand and an overstuffed backpack on his shoulders. It's an image that is all the more haunting after the events of July 7." Still, Fanatic does offer insights to a community that has been, up till now, all-but closed off to the broader British consciousness.

Like an earlier Kureishi screenplay from the 1980s - the angry anti-Thatcherite Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (dir. Stephen Frears) - My Son the Fanatic convincingly shows the generational struggle between an older generation wishing to assimiliate with "the mother country" and a younger, more radical generation that rejects England and all it stands for. (And of course in this they were not unlike countless white subcultures who rejected the BS of postwar, postcolonial Britain. The worry, though, is that unlike other such youth cultures, some elements of British Islamic youth won't "grow out" of their rebellion.)

The reason I have a copy of the film is that in the fall I'm teaching a freshman seminar on Film in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. The theme is tensions and interactions between white Anglo and non-white cultures depicted in film, as each of these three countries moves toward a truly postcolonial cultural paradigm (I'm including England as a "postcolonial" country in this context). I'll be showing films such as Once were Warriors (from New Zealand) and Rabbit-Proof Fence (from Australia). As for Britain: Fanatic provides a fascinating contrast with another film about intergenerational Asian-British conflict: Damien O'Donnell's 1999 film East is East (screenplay by Ayub Khan-Din, based on his play). Om Puri also plays a father in this film, also set in a gritty northern English town, though this time it's set in the early 1970s, the family is "mixed" (the mother is white), and all but one of the children have rejected the father's strict adherance to Islam and Pakistani values, wishing instead to identify themselves as white and English instead of as "Pakis".

These films are fascinating to watch side by side, especially as they both feature Puri in similar yet contrasting roles. While East is East is lighter and more fun, and has a patina of optimism (undoubtedly filtered through a nostalgic haze for a period when "community" still meant something in English towns), Fanatic is much darker. It surely provides a more accurate picture of the tensions in British race relations today - at least as they pertain to the Islamic community.