Critical Essay on Terrorist by John Updike (2006)

Terrorist is a novel by John Updike written in 2006. Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, the main character in the story, was instructed in the Muslim faith ever since he was a child of eleven by the Iman Shaikh Rashid, originally from Yemen. The words and teachings of the Qur’an and his devotion to Allah become the centre of Ahmad’s young life which incidentally, lacks all parental guidance. After he graduates from secondary school he gets a job as a truck driver for Excellency Furnishing Stores where he meets Charlie Chehab and his father, from Lebanon and devoted Muslims too. From then on, the young man is manipulated by his elders to perpetrate a terrorist attack against the Lincoln tunnel, below the Hudson River that unites New Jersey with Manhattan, New York. The attack never comes true because Ahmad’s respect and love of a God given life prevail above the Iman’s mandate of hatred towards Americans and their way of life which he had also tried to generate in the boy.
There is in the novel an ingredient which stands out namely, the animosity towards Americans, their lifestyle and their ill-fated meddling in Arab countries, experienced by the Iman and the other adults around Ahmad. It is they who are responsible for instilling in the boy the same kind of hostility. This negative sentiment is apparently the driving force for committing such a terrible deed as blowing up the tunnel with everybody inside.
The unavoidable question is then, what has generated this state of affairs between these two human groups. Throughout the text one can sense that both parts have reached an impasse where everybody feels terribly bad towards the other group and where they all want to find the way either to inflict pain to the opponent or to protect themselves...

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...ord “justice” fit in this picture? I dare say that each one of the factions involved has got an idea of justice totally different from the rest and it is not without a tremendous effort that world leaders will be able to reach consensus and find a solution that everybody feels is fair.
Tomás Abraham, Argentinean philosopher, with a slightly skeptical but perhaps realistic tone states: “There are no final solutions. There are only possibilities and that is quite something.”

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WORKS CITED

Chomsky, Noam. El terror como política exterior de Estados Unidos. Buenos Aires: Libros del Zorzal, 2001. Print.
Eagleton, Terry. El sentido de la vida (2007) Tr. Albino Mosquera. Barcelona: Paidós, 2008. Print.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism (1993) New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Print.
Updike, John. Terrorist. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Print.