chapter 5 Refracting Fundamentalism in Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012) Ana Cristina Mendes and Karen Bennett i. introduction U ntil recently, Islamic fundamentalism seemed to be so remote from the western capitalist mindset that it could only be grasped through a process of othering, which emphasised difference and reinforced dam- aging neo-Orientalist stereotypes. Yet in the last decade or so, there has been a shift in focus. The meta-narrative of Islamic terrorism as a foreign threat emanating from non-western cultures and motivated by a barely intelligible barbaric agenda has started to give way to another story centred upon the actions of home-grown western jihadists. Unsurprisingly, this has provoked a complex set of conflicting responses among the opinion makers within those countries. Particu- larly influential in this respect are the in-depth human-interest news stories about disaffected citizens of western nations who have joined terrorist associations and moved to Iraq or Syria (as, for example, the leads that followed the widely circulated online video of US journalist James Foley’s beheading by militants of ISIS, or the Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham in 2014). 1 Narratives about Europe’s home-grown Islamist movements now include processes designed to bridge cultural fissures by familiarising viewers with the life trajectories of individuals who have succumbed to the discourse of Jihad Cool and thus been ‘led astray’. Such representations encourage identification with the terror- ists (as well as revealing the identification of them) by suggesting that behind the dark mask might lurk someone we grew up next door to 5136_McSweeney.indd 109 5136_McSweeney.indd 109 10/05/16 6:15 PM 10/05/16 6:15 PM