The Black Album

使年轻人走向伊斯兰极端主义的是，它的思想可以让人类进入幻境中，他们所有的痛苦都会消失。关于穆斯林原教旨主义的事情，原教旨主义者爱权威，他们对每个问题的答案的定义是结束困惑。也许它可以用另一种方式，原教旨主义是治自由的困惑以及其他种类的困惑。把它具体到该案，他在学校表现不好，他甚至让他的女朋友怀孕了，他的父亲也死于心脏病，他的女朋友堕胎了，最后彼此分开。从这一点我们可以知道，他真的很有内疚感，他迫切需要从中脱身，以便他能在适当的时间内享受快乐。

 Shahid, a young man in the late 1980s at a second-rate London college, finds himself torn between his own future and the growing fervor of the Muslim community. Or it can be put in another way that he is put into a dilemma between Muslim fundamentalism and western values so that he can in the meantime express his own personal feelings of being drawn in opposite directions, toward religion and decadence. Shahid explains that he likes Prince because he is the ultimate example of someone caught between two worlds or identities (34). The whole book is actually an attempt to describe the whole process of a young man who is drawn to ideology at the first place, struggles with it and finally rejects it. What I would like to explore in the following is the reasons for Shahid’s attraction to the extremist group in the first beginning and for his rejection of the group in the end. 
      What pulls young men toward Islamic extremism is that it can put human beings into an illusion that all of their sufferings and pains will just disappear if they actually become one member of Islam. The thing about Muslim fundamentalism is that it is the end of puzzlement——the fundamentalists love authority and they have the answer to every single question. Or maybe it can be put in another way that fundamentalism is a cure for liberal puzzlement as well as other kinds of puzzlement. To put it specifically into Shahid’s case, he performed poorly in the school and he even got his girlfriend pregnant on one hand and on the other hand his father died of a heart attack and his girlfriend had an abortion then and they two broke away with each other. From this we can know that he really suffers a lot from guilt and he is in urgent need of getting away from it so that he can in the due time enjoy pleasure from within. Thus he will hold attraction toward the extremist group in the end. 
     While after his experiences with the brothers in the book, he would rather hold rejection toward the extremist group. For one part, Shahid concludes that “there was not fixed self” (285) and he knows that only to choose what is fit for himself would be the best. For another, he thinks about being a writer and a writer, or any type of artist, can be possible to square with any kind of submission to an ideology. Therefore he should have the ability to keep a correct attitude toward the religion so that he can be competent to be a writer in the end. And in the end, he chooses to purify himself and to get himself out of his identity crisis to disengage from his struggle and reject the extremist group. Though I can’t decide whether this was a positive thing or the last stages of depression for him or if Shahid has made the right choice, I am sure that it is a new challenge for him and he should try really hard to quickly adjust himself to the changed identity. 
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