Neo-orientalism in reverse: the voice of the “other” in mohsin hamid’s the reluctant fundamentalist

This article offers a postcolonial and narratological analysis of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, arguing that the novel actively reverses Neo-Orientalist discourse through its narrative structure and use of focalization. Situating the text within post-9/11 cultural and political contexts, the study examines how dominant Western media and literary narratives have constructed Muslim identity through binaries of threat, irrationality, and otherness. Against this background, the article demonstrates how Hamid reclaims narrative authority by centering a Muslim protagonist who speaks in his own voice and controls the terms of representation. Drawing on postcolonial theory and narratology, particularly Gérard Genette’s concept of focalization and its later revisions, the paper argues that the novel’s monologic form and first-person narration transform the Muslim subject from an object of the Western gaze into an active focalizer. By rendering the Western listener silent and epistemologically subordinate, the novel destabilizes conventional subject–object hierarchies that underpin Neo-Orientalist representation. Ultimately, the article contends that The Reluctant Fundamentalist functions not only as a thematic critique of post-9/11 Islamophobia but also as a formal intervention that reconfigures narrative power and challenges hegemonic modes of seeing, knowing, and speaking about the Muslim “Other.”.