My Son the Fanatic Study Guide

Hanif Kureishi was born in 1954 in Bromley, South London, England. Kureishi’s father was Pakistani while his mother was English. He attended a few different universities, ultimately graduating with a degree in Philosophy from Kings College London. He began his writing career writing erotic fiction in the 1970s, and then moved into playwriting. In 1985 he wrote his screenplay, My Beautiful Laundrette, which was adapted into a film. The screenplay—which was progressive for its depiction of an interracial gay couple and its honest depictions of the discrimination that Pakistani people face in England—won the New York City Film Critics Best Screenplay Award and was nominated for an Academy Award. He has written several other screenplays, including one for the cinematic adaptation of “My Son the Fanatic.” Kureishi often incorporates his own personal experiences as well as the experiences of his family members into his writing, including for his 1990 novel The Buddha of Suburbia. His family, however, has publicly disputed the truth of the autobiographical material that has inspired much of his writing, and claim that they’ve been misrepresented in his work. Kureishi has three sons and currently resides in West London.

The stories in Kureishi’s Love in a Blue Time—including “My Son the Fanatic”—span the time period from the 1970s to the early 1990s. As a Cold War tactic against the expansion of the Soviet Union Western countries began supporting fundamentalist Islamic groups opposing the Soviets immediately following World War II. By the 1970s, Western nations, notably the U.S. and the U.K., regularly supplied fundamentalist groups who were allied with regimes that supported Western interests with both money and weapons. In this way, the West played a significant role in the continued rise of fundamentalist Islam during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Additionally, this era of postcolonialism saw increased numbers of immigrants fleeing instability and violence in their home countries, and often settling in the Western nations that had once colonized their countries of origin and contributed to the very instability that the immigrants were now forced to flee. Kureishi’s Pakistani characters living in London are examples of such immigrants. Once abroad, Muslim immigrants, especially, faced discrimination often fueled by sensationalized depictions of radical Islam that overshadowed the reality of Islam as it's practiced by those who aren’t fundamentalist. That discrimination, in turn, sometimes pushed the children of immigrants—who felt the loss of their past history and the pain of being discriminated against in their new home countries—to embrace a more fundamentalist Islamic face in response. “My Son the Fanatic” depicts just such a culture clash between first and second generation Muslim immigrants to England.

“My Son the Fanatic” was originally published as a stand-alone short story in a 1994 edition of The New Yorker, and was republished in Kureishi’s collection of short stories, Love in a Blue Time, in 1997. Like Kureishi’s other most notable works—including his novels The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album as well as his screenplay My Beautiful Laundrette—“My Son the Fanatic” depicts the lives of Pakistani immigrants living in England. His work often explores themes of immigration, assimilation, fundamentalism, postcolonialism, identity, and coming of age. Kureishi’s stories share themes in common with other notable postcolonial novels and collections such as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Interpreter of Maladies.