September 11 was a turning point for me, a time when I realised it was impossible for me to hate the Western culture and values I grew up with, no matter how much some expected this of me.

The timing of the attack couldn't have reinforced my beliefs more. On the Saturday before the tragedy, I had spent the day in the western Sydney seat of Auburn. The local Member of Parliament had resigned, and both major parties were trying to woo voters in a seat where 1 in 3 residents were of Muslim background, faith or heritage.

During the weeks leading upto the Auburn by-election, a small team of us hosted meetings for candidates and party officials with local constituents. MP's and activists from both parties came to realise that their long-term political futures lay in cultivating voters of all ethnic and religious backgrounds. That meant getting to know Muslims at a grassroots level.

On the Tuesday evening after the by-election, we had a debriefing session. We were pleased with the progress we'd made, and were planning further outreach work. At around 10pm, we called it a night. I drove home and walked through the front door to see my parents both awake, their eyes glued to the TV.

"Someone has attacked the Twin Towers. Sit down quickly and watch," my mother said. I dropped my things and sat down with them, watching what seemed to be a scene out of a movie.

Over the next few days, it became clear that this was not going to be a repeat of Oklahoma. The Michigan Militia were nowhere to be found. The suspects were Muslim, even if Sikhs bore the brunt of the early reprisal attacks.

Like most Australians, I was swept up by the emotion of the event. The most appropriate response for me was to increase the level of my engagement with the mainstream. If Imam Hamza Yusuf could visit the White House, I could plant the seeds of an eventual move into federal politics. Within weeks, I took the first step by nominating for a hard-luck seat in which I had no chance of winning but every chance of achieving a good swing.

Yet I was horrified by the responses of some Muslims. One Palestinian Muslim wrote a letter to the editor of a major newspaper saying that the September 11 attacks represented rough justice for the dirty role played by the US in supporting Israel. I could not understand how these people could think like this.

A few days ago, I started revisiting these emotions when I picked up a copy of Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Hamid recently visited Australia for the Sydney Writer's Festival, and I was fortunate to have the chance of catching up with him to discuss the main character in his novel, a Pakistani-born New York business analyst.

Changez was a brilliant young man who topped his district in his high school exams in Lahore and received a scholarship to study at Princeton. Changez kept up his achievements, scoring no grade other than A's in all his subjects. He is then recruited by a boutique New York firm specialising in valuation of firms ready for acquisition.

Like so many middle class Pakistanis, Changez is hardly a mullah. His occasional facial hair is more a reflection of laziness than adherence to the sunnah. Changez enjoys his whisky, and soon finds himself in a relationship with the troubled but wealthy Erica, who was part of the city's arts scene.

Changez's bosses are impressed with his tenacity, and he is sent to the Philippines on a major assignment. On his last day there, after spending time having drinks with his colleagues, Changez returns to his room. Here's how Changez describes the scene:

"I turned on the television and saw what at first I took to be a film. But as I continued to watch, I realised that it was not fiction but news. I stared as one and then the other of the twin towers of New York's World Trade Centre collapsed. And then I smiled. Yes, despicable as it may sound, my initial reaction was to be remarkably pleased."

What kind of sick demented creature could smile watching buildings collapse and innocent people dying?

Changez worked in New York. His office was likely around the corner from the WTC. He perhaps knew people who worked there. More importantly, Changez had been accepted by America's academic and corporate elite with open arms. Through Erica, he also had access to the artistic and cultural elite. Changez was in an enviable position, living what the clich calls the American dream. Is this how Changez, still to some extent a visitor, behaves to his hosts? Is this the thanks he gives for America's generosity?

Hamid's novel is a monologue. Changez stumbles across an American walking through the old Anarkali district of Lahore. He engages the man in what seems to be a day-long conversation, relating to the man his entire life story like some Forrest Gump character minus the southern drawl and plus the record of academic and professional success.

Hamid acknowledges his character is troublesome, a young man with a huge chip on his shoulder. Changez may have lived the American dream, but he could not shake off a sense of resentment and jealousy toward the United States. What made Changez smile was not the deaths of a handful of hijackers and some 3,000 innocent people but rather the destruction of a symbol of American power.

"I wanted to explore the kind of thinking and psychosis I saw in quite a few Muslims after 9/11," Hamid told me. "I was troubled by it, but I also wanted to understand it. Many people simplify these feelings by labelling people like Changez religious fanatics. My job as a novelist is to complicate things and explore their reality."

Changez is a character with a huge chip on his shoulder who feels jealous of what he sees as American power and arrogance. But Changez is no archetypal mullah. The only time he mentions God in the novel is when he successfully clinches his New York job. He happily drinks alcohol even in Pakistan. His family are of aristocratic stock, though the sources of their wealth are fast losing their income generating capacity.

Hamid is troubled by the growth of racism on both sides of the supposed civilisational divide. He wants to show that the "us" and "them" mentality doesn't explain the complex emotions of those finding themselves swinging between both sides. "In reality, there is no 'us' and 'them'. What we have on this planet are individuals with enormously complex mixtures of emotional and political attachments. Often these lead people to resent you or even hate you. But rarely will they harm you unless they have some underlying psychopathy or they are seeking revenge because they feel caught in a cycle of violence."

Hamid is scathing of what he describes as the "We Hate Islam brigade of Muslim writers". He includes in this category Somali-born ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who also toured Australia as part of the Sydney Writers' Festival to promote her autobiography Infidel. "I have no argument with her sharing the horrors of her childhood experiences. But when she claims 1.2 billion Muslims across the world are somehow to blame for all this, she is just engaging in racism. Still, we need to distinguish between her often valid critiques of Muslim cultures from the racist and reductionist tarring of all Muslims with the same brush."

Despite living in the UK, Hamid still loves his home town and Pakistan. He wishes hostile critics of Pakistan would learn of its social sophistication. "Pakistan has more Muslims than any Arab country. Yet we have had a female Prime Minister and our most famous talk-show host is a transvestite!"

Hamid's novel is evidence of the ability of fiction to deal with difficult and sensitive contemporary debates in a manner which enables all sides to understand each other more clearly.

I remember on 9/11, the first chance I had to watch television that day was in the afternoon and they showed a split screen of the collapsed towers and a video of Palestinians allegedly cheering. I thought to myself what was on the minds of the people who decided to juxtaposition these two images. Here was the U.S., shocked about being attacked and the only thing on the Israelis and certain media people’s minds was to show Palestinians cheering.

Ironically, later it was found out that Israelis were caught in New Jersey, cheering and dancing on 9/11 while filming themselves with the WTC in the background. See http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article7545.htm
and http://www.muslimwakeup.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p=57970&highlight;=#57970
This did not get as much media attention. I wonder why?

It is not only Muslims who have not expressed great sadness about 9/11. From the 2003 edition of The Clash of Fundamentalisms by Tariq Ali. It says on page 2 of the Prologue:

"I want to ask why so many people in non-Islamic parts of the world were unmoved by what took place and why so many celebrated, in the chilling phrase of Osama bin Laden, an 'America struck by almighty Allah in its vital organs'. In the Nicaraguan capital, Managua, people hugged each other in silence.' In Porto Alegre, in the deep south of Brazil, a large concert hall packed with young people erupted in anger when a visiting Black jazz musician from New York insisted on beginning his performance with a rendering of 'God Bless America'. The kids replied with chants of 'Osama, Osama!' The concert was cancelled. There were celebrations on the streets in Bolivia. From Argentina the Mothers who had been demonstrating for years to discover how and when the local military had 'disappeared' their children refused to join the officially orchestrated mourning. In Greece the government suppressed the publication of opinion polls that showed a large majority actually in favour of the hits, and football crowds refused to observe the two-minute silence.

In Beijing the news came too late in the night for anything more than a few celebratory fireworks, but in the week that followed the reaction became clearer. While the Politburo dithered for over twenty-four hours, Hsinhua, the official Chinese news agency, putout a short video of the 11 September footage complete with Hollywood music so that the moment could be relished at leisure. A second video mixed images of the events with footage from King Kong and other disaster movies."

It's so very different from the thinking of the Pakistanis I've known, some of whom are either contemptuous of Islamic militancy ("I'm proud to be a bad Muslim!") or fearful of it ("I came to America because I didn't want to become a drug addict from the gangs who stop my car and force me to shoot up.") Sounds like a good read.

Mohsin Hamid is a great writer. In addition to the novels he wrote, he has also contributed to the Time Magazine. Here is a piece I quite enjoyed:

Mohammed Ali Jinnah
Pakistan, the nation the Quaid-i-Azam founded, needs him and his values more than ever
By Mohsin Hamid

My earliest memory of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's Quaid-i-Azam, or Great Leader, is from my childhood. The electricity had gone because of load shedding, and I was doing my homework despite my grandmother's insistence that this was bad for my eyes. My textbook was part of the curriculum assigned to all primary-school students in Pakistan, and it described Jinnah as a young boy, himself reading a book by candlelight at his home in Karachi, a hundred years earlier. I had heard of Jinnah before, of course; his name was ubiquitous in Pakistan, a country otherwise unsure of its heroes. But it was the small miracle contained in the notion that he - a character in a book - and I - a reader in real life - were doing precisely the same thing that struck me most, and has stayed with me ever since.

In Pakistan, Jinnah is venerated because his struggles on behalf of the Muslims of India resulted in the establishment of the country. But Jinnah's true claim to greatness as an Asian leader is more universal: he sought to protect the rights of minorities through constitutional law.

Jinnah was a secular, Westernized, British-trained barrister; himself a Muslim, he married a Parsi, spoke mainly in English and wore European clothes. In 1920, he left Mahatma Gandhi's Indian National Congress, of which he had been a member for two decades, not because of his own faith but because he believed Gandhi's use of Hindu symbolism would encourage religious zealotry in politics. As Asia emerged from colonization, among the most vexing problems facing the continent's nascent nation states was that of their large minority populations. Jinnah's preferred solution was a legal one: constitutional measures ranging from electoral safeguards to guaranteed representation in state institutions. It was only when his attempts to achieve these measures failed that he began to campaign for a separate state for the Muslims of the subcontinent.

Six decades later, Pakistan has drifted far from Jinnah's vision of a secular democracy. President Pervez Musharraf, who invokes Jinnah's values in speeches, has little patience for democracy. The religious opposition parties reject as un-Pakistani the concept of secularism. And the inhabitants of smaller provinces like Baluchistan find themselves lacking the protection for minorities that Jinnah made his life's mission. If one believes in the rule of law, mistrusts religious zealotry and opposes tyrannies constructed in the name of majorities, one should find it easy to see oneself in Jinnah and to empathize with his struggle. Much of Asia could learn from his example, none more so than those of us who belong to the state he founded.

Mohsin Hamid's second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, will be published next spring

http://www.time.com/time/asia/2006/heroes/nb_jinnah.html