Race And Religion In The Kite Runner By Khaled Hosseini

Your race and religion shape your everyday actions and decisions. They are the most important parts of your identity. They are there from the day you’re born to the night you die. These things could also influence some to do bad things that others may find terrible or deplorable. Like Assef in The Kite Runner. In Khaled Hosseini’s novel, The Kite Runner, race and religion affect Assef’s beliefs and actions by the way he treats Hassan and Amir and the way he acts when he joins the Taliban. Assef was raised believing that his religion was the true religion and that his race was the only one that belonged in Afghanistan. This affected how he socialized with others of different races and how he treated anyone whose beliefs differed from his. Like his meeting with Amir, raping Hassan because he was a Hazara and because Hazaras believed in different things than he did, and turning Hassan’s son, Sohrab, into a sex slave. …show more content…
When Amir went looking for Sohrab he came face to face with Assef and this time they were adults. Assef hadn’t changed at all because now he was even more set in his ways and he had said that his religion is what made him do the things he did. He had thought that God was on his side because of it. “I never forget a face. Not ever” (Hosseini 281). Assef said this to remind Amir of what had happened almost 20 years ago. To show him that he remembered all the ways that he had disrespected his race and everything he believed in. By being friends with a Hazara and by not acting like a real Pashtun, Assef saw Amir as a traitor and impure. Which is why he almost beat him to death. It was because of his race and religion that he saw Amir as a traitor to his own