This is not a policy statement from one of those right-wing populist politicians who seem to have multiplied in recent years. These words come from the distinguished British novelist Martin Amis, interviewed in 2006 about community relations in Britain and the “threat” from Muslims. The unliterary lack of measured reflection in this comment is symptomatic of the heated debate about Islam and Muslims as it occurs today. Where once one might have expected a discussion informed by some degree of sophistication and historical awareness, now the Internet and social media provide an immediate platform for intemperate views to be aired and every ill-informed opinion to be rehearsed. Worse still, violent anti-Muslim rhetoric has become commonplace. When politicians start to articulate prejudice in much the same terms, you know society is in trouble.

QUESTION: When did violent anti-Muslim rhetoric become common in mainstream political speech? Worth tracing the timeline from 2006 forward.

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, Islamophobia has emerged as the dominant mode of prejudice in contemporary Western societies. In North America and across the nations of Europe, concerns about “the Muslim problem” are central to political debates and policies. As part of the response to international conflicts, acts of terrorism, and state violence in the West itself, the figure of “the Muslim” has come under increased scrutiny. Muslims and Islam have emerged as the focal point of anxieties about citizenship, loyalty, and liberal values. They have been the object of heightened levels of criticism, intolerance, and abuse—their cultures homogenized and vilified and their religion depicted as backward and warlike. The same vitriol has passed into mainstream currency, finding outlets in journalism, film, and television dramas, in political statements, and in the outlaw spaces of the Internet.

This book is not about Islamophobia in the novel. Rather, it critically surveys some fictional dramatizations of cultural difference and conflict that take their cue from current anxieties. It traces a variety of responses, some of which tend to reproduce existing ideological biases and others that question or refute them. Through contextualized close readings of a number of English-language texts from around the world, the book reveals how literary responses to the supposed “clash of civilizations” have been nuanced and often highly critical. The novels demonstrate a range of positions: from the avowedly secular to the religious and from texts that appear to underwrite Western assumptions of cultural superiority to those that recognize and critique neoimperial impulses. Although some authors in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 (9/11) can be said to have actively aligned themselves with the presumed values of the West, formal ambiguities within their texts make for a complex and often ambiguous interpretative experience that challenges the truth claims of culturally exclusivist agendas.

DEFINE: Frames the book's scope: it examines literary dramatizations of cultural difference rather than Islamophobia per se, surveying a spectrum from reproducing to refuting ideological bias.

In that respect, it becomes necessary for us to examine the cultural work that formal and generic features are doing in promoting or rejecting particular types of worldview. Thus, I propose to analyze key elements of the representative novels chosen, attending to qualities such as ambiguity; stereotyping; the effects of polyphony; response to the burden of representation that falls on “minority” writers; the fetishization of authenticity; and the presence of a certain kind of exotic idiom that blends the attractive and desirable with (in the Muslim case) the austere and repressive. These features offer ways to understand the novel in its response to Islamophobia because they are central to the novel’s meaning making as an art form. Close attention to them will help us to avoid falling back on judgments based simply on whether a book is sympathetic to Muslims or Islam or not.

Theodor Adorno also takes up these concerns in Aesthetic Theory. Adorno claims that art is a social act, yet one produced by the tension between the formal autonomy of the work, on the one hand, and its rootedness within society, on the other. The tensions within works of art are expressive of conflicts within the larger sociohistorical processes from which they emerge. He says, “The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form.” For Adorno, art operates through its own internal tensions to expose hidden contradictions within society as a whole.

DEFINE: Clarifies Adorno's aesthetic theory: artworks internalize and express social antagonisms as formal problems.

The nature of this frame is something Amina Yaqin and I explore in our book Framing Muslims. There we are concerned with tracing this encircling discursive boundary as it appears in political rhetoric, journalism, and popular-media texts. Yet a type of framing can be seen at work in literature, too. Literary framing takes place on three levels. First, any act of writing in and of itself is an act of framing; it is an act of bringing together and accentuating themes, issues, and characters as well as of dramatizing the consequences of the collision of different ideas. This is particularly true of what might be called multicultural fictions that focus on relationships between groups with different traditions and value systems. These works always already occupy a terrain contested by warring and hierarchically unequal discourses. However, that framing act then takes place within a much larger frame: the agenda-led frame governing political, media, and journalistic discourses about the key issues defining intercultural relations. In the case of Muslims, these issues have to do with a lack of integration, gender inequality, a propensity for “radicalization,” and so on. Finally, we can see those two acts of framing—the textual and the contextual—as being integral to the way such texts are then placed in the frame governing their production, reception, and recognition as “literary.” This third-level frame validates certain types of utterance in which those key “Muslim” issues become central to the way texts are understood, grouped together, marketed, and reviewed.

DEFINE: Explains literary framing as operating on three levels: textual, contextual/political-discursive, and the frame governing production and recognition as 'literary'.

However, we should be wary of seeing all literary and cultural perspectives that are critical of Islam as “Islamophobic.” Blanket denunciations are unhelpful because they tend to close down debate and are insufficiently attentive to the status of many of these texts as creative products of art and imagination—something that makes them prone to the same forces of hesitation and inconsistency that always animate those activities. In particular, the novel—with the modes of address it employs and with its unique purchase on the imagination of a reader who is required to create in his or her mind a world and thereafter to populate it—cannot be reduced to pure “message,” whether positive or negative.

DEFINE: Clarifies why the label 'Islamophobic' fails for literary texts: novels are creative products prone to hesitation and inconsistency, not reducible to pure message.

This tendency to view non-Western literatures as essentially anthropological in nature—affording the assumed Western reader an insight into exotically different lives—is a long-standing one. It amounts to what Gayatri C. Spivak has called an “information retrieval” approach in dealing with the literature of the culturally different subject.

In this book, I argue that this approach creates what we might call a market for the Muslim. This means that texts from around the world that engage with the existing political articulation of “the Muslim problem,” contain the right elements, and offer some kind of “authentic” pseudoanthropological insight will be published, circulated, reviewed, and critiqued more or less to the extent that they reproduce existing cultural viewpoints. (They can be hostile to or in tension with these viewpoints, but as long as they rehearse them, they will be recognized and accepted.) This is how framing works. So the market for the Muslim has both aesthetic and economic dimensions.

DEFINE: Defines the core concept 'market for the Muslim' — a framing mechanism where texts gain publication and circulation to the degree they reproduce dominant cultural viewpoints.

Indeed, one of the remarkable features about many of the Muslim novels that have garnered praise and attention over the past few years is the degree to which they are deemed to offer direct, seemingly unmediated insights into hitherto hidden aspects of Muslim life and experience. To write this kind of novel in an era of Islamophobia is, at least indirectly, to accept a frame in which Muslim cultural values are contrasted with Western, more enlightened, more liberal ones, even if one's project is to explode this myth.

XREF: Connects to broader discourse on the 'burden of representation' and how marginalized authors are read through their identity — echoes discussions of ethnography-as-fiction common in postcolonial studies.

Writers need the leeway to address any and all matters of concern, in particular those in which they feel a personal investment. However, Aslam's response indicates the extent to which the default expectations engendered by topicality are never neutral, least of all when the subject matter is what is commonly deemed Muslim religious or cultural behavior. In the hands of more ideological writers, the moral imperative to address injustice becomes almost inseparable from wholesale endorsement of the neoimperial civilizing mission of the United States. In these writers' novels, the confluence of Muslim religious doctrine with political power is inevitably disastrous, compromising individual liberty at every turn. Western intervention is then a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Two points follow from this claim: the first is that we need to jettison any idea of a more “authentic” voice coming from Muslim writers working outside this frame; the second is that the challenge to avoid anthropological pitfalls is one of form as much as of content. … In the market for the Muslim, the so-called authenticity of a text is decided by publishers and editors, who shape the text in the publication process, as well as by reviewers and critics, who deem a text “authentic” or otherwise according to how well it satisfies these predetermined criteria. As Sarah Brouillette aptly writes, “For something to be experienced as authentic it must be marked as authentic, but when it is marked as authentic it is mediated … and hence lacks the authenticity of what is truly unspoiled, untouched by mediating cultural codes.”

XREF: Connects to ideas of authenticity as a socially constructed label, echoing work on mediation and commodification of cultural identity in literature.

The particular pressure on Muslim writers would seem to contradict that frequent observation—made by Timothy Brennan, among others—that literary sophistication is a type of bad faith, marking the “Third World” writer’s alienation from his or her own people through the valorization of established Western aesthetic criteria. The point here is not that experimental or modernist writing is somehow preferable to or better than realism, but rather that the anthropological frame is such that it may be necessary to devise an aesthetic that refuses and challenges that frame.

XREF: Connects to broader debates about postcolonial literature, world literature, and the framework of reading 'Third World' writers through anthropological rather than aesthetic lenses.

In his essay “Is Nothing Sacred?,” written in the early years of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa against him, Salman Rushdie promotes once more the familiar idea that the novel is almost by definition a bastion of freedom against the narrow exclusivism of religion: “Whereas religion seeks to privilege one language above all others, one text above all others, one set of values above all others, the novel has always been about the way in which different languages, values and narratives quarrel.” This is a popular line of argument among writers, generally used to bolster claims about the novel form as a conduit for empathy. Ahdaf Soueif, for instance, sees the writer’s duty as being to create characters who stimulate empathy in readers—“such powerful empathy that they want to reach through the print to help or comfort them.… A work of fiction lives by empathy—the extending of myself into another’s, the willingness to imagine myself in someone else’s shoes.” These thoughts are a handy reminder of the basic tasks of fiction, but we need also to distinguish active transcultural empathy from a lazily universalizing notion of shared human experience that can encourage us to respond only to that which is already familiar.

DEFINE: Distinguishes active transcultural empathy from lazy universalizing of familiar experience.

We owe it to ourselves and to those who try accurately to depict experience using prose fiction to be aware that our conventional tools should always be employed judiciously and self-consciously, with the awareness that times and societies change.

However, given that most people evincing anti-Islamic prejudice identify the belief system of Islam as causing certain types of behavior in its adherents, Islamophobia seems as good a term as any. … Moreover, the urgency of addressing violence and discrimination almost always justified through hostility to beliefs and culture means that such semantic quibbling appears now something of a luxury, particularly while Islamophobic attacks rise in tandem with anti-Semitism as the extreme Right is emboldened.

In Deepa Kumar's view, Islamophobic myths of a perpetual struggle between Islam and the West, sometimes held in abeyance but always eventually resurfacing, seriously misrepresent history. … Kumar reminds us that, in fact, attitudes to Islam and Muslims in the West have changed across history: from an early, baffled curiosity to the comparative harmony of La Convivencia in Moorish Spain, the hostility of the Crusades, the Romantic-era fascination with the "Gorgeous East," and the most recent phase in which U.S. policies toward Muslim countries have been pragmatic and varied.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's Orientalism and debates about the cyclical vs. linear nature of Islam-West relations.

Indeed, Islamophobia—like all prejudices—actually reveals more about those holding the prejudice than it does about its objects. … A demonic Islamic enemy is all the better for diverting attention from intractable economic and social problems caused by late capitalism and the socially eviscerating tendencies of neoliberalism.

XREF: This projection psychology parallels scapegoating theories and the way out-groups function as displacement targets for systemic economic failures.

However, there is also what I would describe as a strain of latent Islamophobia, dependent on a powerful, often tacit assumption that Islam and Muslim cultures are inferior to an evolved, secular Western model. … Therefore, in addition to looking at Islamophobia as a mode of prejudice that might be practiced by individuals or groups against other individuals or groups, we need also to remember the enabling context for such prejudice.

DEFINE: The author distinguishes individual prejudice from an 'enabling context' — a structural or systemic precondition that makes such prejudice possible and legitimate.

Modernity’s corollary has been the ability to place those whose societies have evolved in other ways beyond the limits of the fully human, resulting in discriminatory treatment that became most clearly formulated in the paralegal status of “enemy combatants” and the establishment of offshore camps for detainees—such as that in Guantánamo Bay—where subjects defined as less than human, shorn of their rights, can be caged. In other words, modernity becomes the benchmark through which to measure and therefore to define the human.

XREF: Connects to critiques of colonial modernity and the concept of dehumanization through legal classification, echoing postcolonial theory and Arendt's analysis of rights.

The value of literature lies partly in the way it structures our feelings about the world and others in it, providing imaginative access to alternative experiences. In literature, the assumption that the novel form itself and the values it is said to carry are in some way an embodiment of the pure flowering of post-Enlightenment Western culture ignores other models for the development of prose fiction and overlooks the ways that cultures inform each other through their historical proximity and interaction and how their creative genres take shape in part due to that contact.

However, some of these criticisms, such as that offered by Anouar Majid, begin from the false premise that postcolonialism is merely the theoretical wing of identity politics and that “the postcolonial” is the inevitably compromised brainchild of those “comprador intellectuals” first picked out by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Arif Dirlik. In fact, “the postcolonial” is a description of our contemporary world condition, not a set of theories or an identity. It sums up life for many who wrestle with the legacy of historical colonialism and find their place in the world still acted on by controlling impulses of the powerful nations of the West. It also encompasses the willed amnesia with which these privileged First World nations continue to blame contemporary problems on recidivism or “fundamentalism,” read as inherent in subject peoples and nations, just as it was in the days of empire. Indeed, postcolonial perspectives have become even more salient in a post-9/11 world, where the justification and tactics of Western domination have reemerged with renewed force.

DEFINE: Clarifies what 'the postcolonial' actually names: a description of contemporary world conditions shaped by colonial legacy, not a set of theories or an identity.

This view is strictly back to front. It implies that in focusing closely on a given text, the critic is only and forever interested in texts in isolation. This book takes issue with this idea precisely in its attempt to derive symptomatic examples from a range of texts spread across the world. We cannot bypass the stage of engagement with literary texts as texts. If the relative autonomy of a work of art means anything at all, it surely requires of us attention to those facets of any piece of writing that are conflicted. It draws our eye to the rough brushstroke, the flaw in the material, the clash that suddenly sheds new and unintended light. In other words, we can understand the way in which literature makes its meaning as literature only by attending to voice and rhythm, the stated and the elliptical, the whole melding of past, present, and future through which the work of prose fiction takes shape, presented by the author as choices of form. From these essential features, we can then work outward toward a better grasp of the way that works of fiction and their generic frames at given points in space and time help to construct, reinforce, but also sometimes contest everyday commonplaces.

In Samir Amin’s more sanguine view, “the project of contemporary political Islam … is a conservative project, completely acceptable to the capitalist world order,” and Western governments “know that the power of political Islam has the virtue, for them, of rendering the people powerless and, consequently, ensuring their comprador status.… The savagery attributed to the people who are the primary victims of political Islam facilitates the growth of Islamophobia. That, in turn, makes it easier to accept the prospect of an increasingly polarized capitalist expansion.”

XREF: Connects to debates about Islamophobia as a tool of Western economic hegemony versus the framing of political Islam purely as anti-Western resistance.

As Amin says, “It is not the fundamentalist ideology with religious pretensions that is in the driver's seat and imposes its logic on the real holders of power, i.e., capital and its servants in the state. It is capital alone that makes all the decisions that suit it, and then mobilizes this ideology to its service.” It is up to us whether literature stands in thrall to this ideology or uses its interrogative power to challenge the ideology.

DEFINE: Clarifies the relationship between ideology and underlying economic power — ideology is a servant of capital, not the driving force. SEED: Potential essay on whether literature can genuinely push back against ideology or only ever serves power structures.

Therefore, a certain critical distance can be useful. We may, perhaps, see Islamophobia more clearly as a structuring frame if we can stand back and understand it as a kind of call-and-response: certain demands are made of the writers who deal with “Muslim issues,” and they either accede to or problematize those demands. In other words, framing is always dialogic, and it takes a certain amount of cunning and guile for the writer to be able to circumvent imposed limitations on what they can say and how it will be interpreted. Critics need to be similarly supple.

DEFINE: Frames literary production around imposed limitations that writers must cunningly work around.

However, it is in their mutual interest in the slippery processes of reading and writing—Nafisi's characters read from the canon of great Western literature, Hosseini's protagonist is a writer—that both texts expose the expedient and questionable nature of their judgments. The truth claims of these two exhibits in the court of world opinion are thus exposed as ideologically sealed but at the same time never watertight.

XREF: Connects to broader postcolonial critique of how Western-reading novels perform authenticity for global audiences — echoes Edward Said's orientalism framework.

In the liberal thrillers examined in chapter 5, John Le Carré, Dan Fesperman, and Richard Flanagan are concerned to contest those states of exception that engulfed Muslim subjects as their citizenship was called into question and their ability to move across borders was curtailed. These writers rehearse the precarious position of the outsider, or homo sacer, who already exists on the periphery and is vulnerable to the full force of securitization and exclusion.

DEFINE: The highlight introduces the concept of homo sacer — the peripheral outsider vulnerable to exclusion — as a lens for understanding Muslim subjects under securitization.

However, they also tend to displace experiences of marginalization from Muslims to white, non-Muslim protagonists, suggesting a discomfort with conveying culturally different experience in their novels.

SEED: Possible angle: examining how well-meaning authors sidestep carrying marginalized voices by writing displaced, outsider characters — a craft and ethics issue.

For every Martin Amis scurrying to rearticulate the truisms of Euro-American cultural superiority, there is an Abdul Rahman Munif addressing the human cost of the pursuance of Western greed and exceptionalism, but they do not enjoy equal exposure.

In the erection and codification of "our" values—that which separates "us" from "them"—the categories are not neutral. Indeed, these categories are produced by and in turn are productive of Western normativity. They tend to view culture as essential and formative as opposed to constructed and negotiable. Culture talk tends to reify cultures as objects that have attributes driving individual behavior. This has led to attacks on Islam for its supposedly inevitable and predictable impact on its adherents, usually traced back to the myth that the Quran supposedly forces a literal interpretation and thus determines behavior, whereas the Bible and in turn Christianity have a tradition of critical interpretation. In assuming that culture causes people to do certain things, this view also exoticizes the Other—although, as we will see later in the book, this exoticization is less about cozy commodification and more about the frisson of vicariously experienced threat. More-liberal positions tend toward a minimization of difference on the basis of notions of a "shared humanity." Such familiar modes of categorization fail to recognize their own cultural privilege and support for a universal system. Tolerance is mistaken for good citizenship in a move that eventually tends to yield to demands for assimilation when its notions of acceptable difference are challenged.

Thus far I have been referring to culture as the logic of practices by which a notion of unity is created. These practices depend on a performative sense of ourselves and of Others that has to be created and constantly reiterated. For example, the othering of Muslims as terrorists and irrational people requires certain mechanisms to allow it to spread and be internalized. Talal Asad writes of modernity as a project aimed at institutionalizing certain principles—"constitutionalism, moral autonomy, democracy, human rights, … consumerism, freedom of the market—and secularism. It employs proliferating technologies (of production, warfare, travel entertainment, medicine) that generate new experiences of space and time, of cruelty and health, of consumption and knowledge." Against each of these principles, "the Muslim" is positioned as aberration or threat. Such an undertaking involves the aesthetic realm, too—that other, narrower kind of "culture" usually taken to mean the arts, media, and sometimes science and often having class connotations. Literature, for all the claims made for its independence, is one of these technologies.

The fact that, as critics have frequently remarked, both novels have to resort to quite contrived and implausible denouements is indicative of a certain strain in the task of standing up for liberal humanist values. In fact, both McEwan and Updike—like Amis—manifest a marked postimperial melancholia of the kind identified by Paul Gilroy. In Britain the loss of empire and in the United States the loss of a particular white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant consensus have led to compensatory fantasies about the reassertion of white male power in the face of competing claims by others. In keeping with the two novels’ domestication of cultural struggles, the decline of white male power is figured as a failure of parental (and especially paternal) protection. This failure then calls for a reassertion of masculinities of a particularly assertive kind, corresponding to ideals of a national “best self” that has been lost and must be retrieved.

Even then, both novels manage to concoct endings characterized by a sort of default-setting liberal wish fulfillment in which the forces of death and disorder are vanquished and the threat from the irrational negated. In both texts, acts of reading (and misreading)—of critical interpretation—are central to the resolution of the plot. For the satisfactory triumph of their endorsed value systems, both depend on the “conversion” of the threatening Other, and yet, at the same time, the faith displayed by characters is always haunted by its flipside, doubt.

The talismanic potential of literature is dependent on its openness to being interpreted. As it has been deployed in current debates, it is taken to stand in contrast to the “closed” sacred text of Islam. Asad revisits his comparative history of these ideas in his book Formations of the Secular to suggest that although interpretation of the Quran has always been open and shifting, there has been no equivalent of that nineteenth-century European tradition of “higher” criticism that drew so strongly on Enlightenment and German idealism to treat the Bible as a literary text open to being read in mythological and symbolic as well as literalist ways.

DEFINE: Clarifies Asad's distinction between open Quranic interpretation and the nineteenth-century European 'higher criticism' tradition that approached the Bible as a literary text.

The legacy of German idealism feeds directly into English Romanticism, particularly in the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who drew on Kant and Schelling to suggest that objects of perception are really composed only of ideas in the perceiving mind. In literature, idealism came to mean the representation of things in an ideal form or as they might be: the imaginative treatment of a subject through poetry or fiction. If true reality is located in our consciousness, then this bestows a central importance on the imagination. Coleridge’s poetic practice famously begins from an appreciation of the importance of imagination, a vital force with the power to transform objects and transfigure the mundane.

XREF: Connects German Idealism (Kant, Schelling) to English Romanticism, a cross-tradition philosophical lineage.

What is of interest here is that each of these critics was writing at a time of perceived social upheaval: Coleridge wrote Church and State between Catholic emancipation in 1829 and the First Reform Act of 1932; Arnold penned Culture and Anarchy just after the Second Reform Act (1867) and in the wake of the Hyde Park Riots and resulting fear of working-class anarchy; Leavis’s entire career coincided with the multiple and sequential upheavals of mass popular culture, war, decolonization, and, latterly, immigration. When McEwan and Amis return to these authority figures after 9/11—even in a spirit of critical engagement—they display not just a particular kind of mysophobic social conservatism but also a fantasy return to the womb, with its comforting feeling of an organic, continuous, and racially homogeneous national culture.

Saba Mahmood has gone so far as to claim that the tendency to read all texts, including sacred ones, as symbolic systems rather than divine truth is the key difference between Christianity and Islam, creating a “normative secularity” against which Muslims—with their inability to put sufficient critical distance between themselves and their sacred text—are weighed in the balance and found wanting. … For her, secular antipathy is fortified by “a certain commitment to the poetic resources of the Judeo-Christian tradition—evident in a literary and aesthetic sensibility.”

XREF: Relates to Mahmood's broader critique of secularism and the politics of religious difference in her work on religious freedom.

The Romantic view of art as autonomous, existing in and for itself, meant that it was ideally positioned to replace God as the transcendent repository of value. The secularization of the university in the nineteenth century ironically furthered the religious aura accumulating around art and literature, while the humanities took shape as a discipline emerging from philology and moral science.

QUESTION: This describes a historical process where art inherits the sacral role of religion. What are the current implications for how we treat literature? XREF: Relates to broader discussions of secularization theory and cultural capital, echoing ideas from Weber and Bourdieu about value transfer.

Jo Carruthers reinforces this point in her book England’s Secular Scripture, which traces the development of a Protestant-derived quintessential English aesthetic valuing simplicity and directness as set against more demonstrative or ritualistic traditions. Beginning with the iconoclasm of the Reformation and its rejection of Catholic pomp and ritual, theological doctrine became transposed into a moral and aesthetic register and wedded to the emergent English nation. … The canon of English literature forms what Carruthers calls a “secular scripture” in its hallowed preference for the transparent “style-less” style of realism and its emphasis on directness and moral seriousness. … In our present age, this script has become combative, aligning itself with expressions of prejudice against Islam as a publicly performed religion. … Thus, we see instances of what is argued to be “rational Islamophobia” from public figures, such as the journalist Polly Toynbee and the authors Fay Weldon and Jeanette Winterson, wherein claims are made for the reasonableness of anti-Islamic feeling on account of Islam’s own visible irrational qualities.

Annabelle Sreberny has observed how in this essay Amis employs the personal pronoun we in different ways, sometimes to signal a personal opinion—“we would hope the [U.S.] response will be, above all, non-escalatory” (9)—and at other times to indicate or try to engender Western cultural solidarity: “What are we to do?” (9). In each case, however, the effect is to delineate between perpetrators and victims, Islam and the West. … Sreberny remarks wryly: “That individual pieces of writing should echo the dominant political frames of the day is perhaps not a surprise; but ‘we’ (academics) don’t often get a chance to see this happening so clearly.”

XREF: Connects to narratology and rhetorical analysis of authorial voice and reader positioning.

Against the contemptible weak thinking of religion, Amis ranges the playfully rational individual voices of writers, supposedly all espousing “the ideology of no ideology” (19), whatever that may be. This faux naïf pretence that literature stands clear of political taint is a very old liberal humanist canard. To see it appear again in this context—at a time when it was de rigeur to take sides in the war on terror—strikes an oddly anachronistic note.

XREF: Connects to broader debates about the politics of aesthetic autonomy and ideological critique of 'disinterested' art.

When Leavis wrote in 1972 that “the obvious truth stands there too starkly to be ignored: we might multiply our intake of immigrants by fifty and make no difference to the problem of over-population in the undeveloped countries—though we should ensure catastrophic transformations in our own,” he anticipated contemporary right-wing populism with its simplistic diagnoses of contemporary ills caused by immigration and cultural dilution.

XREF: Connects 1970s anti-immigration rhetoric to contemporary populist discourse, showing a continuity in nativist argumentative patterns.

Perowne is an archrationalist, taking comfort in his professional capabilities and the ordered certainties offered by science. In particular, he is committed to a Darwinian perspective that offers a more acceptable mythology than creationism’s supernatural explanations. … However, as the delusions of divinity suggest, Perowne’s convictions themselves have something of the quality of religious faith, and his hubris means that, from the outset, in the historical moment of threat he inhabits there is always the sense that he is riding for a fall.

XREF: Perowne echoes the tragic hubris arc common in Ian McEwan's protagonists, and the idea of reason as a form of faith parallels critiques of scientism elsewhere.

The choice of Arnold's poem at the book's moment of crisis is not simply a statement about the therapeutic power of great writing. It seems also to call up that larger Victorian program by which the masses were to be educated into their role as social arbiters in an era of advancing democracy. Saturday appears to promote the same project as Culture and Anarchy in proposing exposure to "the best that has been thought and said" as a way of correctly channeling dangerous energies. … Culture here stands against the "anarchy" seemingly threatened by more or less everyone else: drug addicts, peace protesters, the mentally ill, and Muslims. Perowne's paranoia is almost parodic at times, but the prescribed cure seems offered in all seriousness.

XREF: Links to Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy and its Victorian project of educating the masses into social stability.

Baxter stands awestruck by the poem, and Perowne speculates that he is experiencing a profound, moving nostalgia that reminds him "how much he wanted to live" (278). Although Baxter's mind is being eaten away by Huntington's, his mood swing here takes on a broader implication, connecting him to a cultural or civilizational consciousness in which he is immersed for all his disenfranchisement. The miraculously pacifying qualities of the poem's slow incantation by Daisy, soothing the savage breast of a man intent on violence, gives it a privileged power in the book. … The argument is not simply that personal affection and tenderness may act as a protection against the chaos of a world threatened by "ignorant armies" on the march but also that the values of culture and education as a bulwark against the ignorant, rebellious masses advanced by Arnold in his broader work appear somehow revived and retooled for application in the modern world.

XREF: Connects to Matthew Arnold's cultural criticism and the idea of high culture as a civilizing bulwark.

By implication, Baxter and the other outsiders and untouchables of this world are excluded from these benefits but can be "brought in" through education and exposure to their power. Like a boy with his nose pressed against a sweet-store window at Christmas, Baxter can only look on in spellbound wonder at the goodies being tantalizingly dangled before him. The therapeutic qualities of Arnold's work suggest that the excluded may be transformed by exposure to art and literature, although—as with Arnold and his fellow nineteenth-century liberals—there is always some doubt as to whether the aim is to empower or to pacify them.

DEFINE: Clarifies the dual intent behind Arnold's therapeutic, liberal model of art education — whether its purpose is empowerment or pacification of the excluded.

Here it is used as a blanket to throw over all those who do not enjoy the material benefits of progress and civilization. … In a novel full of optical images, the most disabling blind spot is that experienced by Henry Perowne as he gazes from his bedroom window.

XREF: Connects to Ian McEwan's Saturday and its use of optical/blindness imagery.

As Perowne, "the professional reductionist," thinks of his family, he reflects: "So much divides them from the various broken figures that haunt the benches.… It can't just be class or opportunities.… [I]t's down to invisible folds and kinks of character, written in code at the level of molecules.… No amount of social justice will cure or disperse this enfeebled army haunting the public spaces of every town.… You have to recognise bad luck when you see it, you have to look out for these people" (272). The social drivers of class and race, then, purportedly have a negligible role to play in producing Perowne's own advantages and the disadvantages of others. Superior breeding, in all senses, wins out.

XREF: Perowne's genetic determinism echoes reductionist readings of biological essentialism, connectable to debates on meritocracy and the nature/nurture divide in contemporary fiction.

As Paul Gilroy has remarked, the besetting inability of the British to face the profound change in status that followed the end of empire has resulted in a "postimperial melancholia" that has only gathered pace with widespread immigration. The denial of the cruelty and injustice accompanying empire—from which Perowne's privileged lifestyle ultimately derives—has a considerable psychological and moral cost. In explaining away injustice as the product of genetics and in symbolically eliding the anger of the dispossessed with the terrorism of the Islamist, McEwan flattens multiple historical factors and normalizes the exculpatory viewpoint of the rich, white, male subject.

XREF: Connects to broader postcolonial theory and critiques of McEwan's Saturday; also echoes Gilroy's work on postimperial melancholia.

Although Jack does not express himself in quite such stark terms, the novel as a whole treats nonwhite cultures as debased and problematic. In particular, black culture—here represented by Ahmad's classmates Joryleen, choir girl turned hooker, and her pimping, thuggish boyfriend—is presented in grotesquely stereotypical terms. In the same way, Jack admits to an instinctive dislike for Islam and has a mental block when it comes to Ahmad's Muslim surname.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of liberal fiction treating racial others through stereotype rather than full humanity. QUESTION: Worth asking whether the critic's reading of the novel is fair or reductive about authorial intent.

As the novel's representative free spirit, Terry Molloy articulates the value of art and might be expected to emerge as the main valorized voice countering the bleak austerity of her son's worldview. However, things turn out not to be that straightforward. The text implies that Terry's embrace of artistic freedom comes at the cost of nurturing Ahmad appropriately. She is drawn as an overstretched single parent who does her best to support her son. However, we are told that she "sees her son often for less than one hour in twenty four" (9), spending most time in her job as a nursing aide at the local hospital. Terry claims little talent for motherhood, and Ahmad disapproves of her lifestyle and regular string of lovers. He sees her as "a victim of the American religion of freedom … though freedom to do what and to what purpose is left up in the air" (167). Terry embodies a different kind of malaise in which the cost of personal freedom is borne by others.

XREF: Connects to the broader tension between individual freedom and communal/familial obligation. Also parallels Ahmad's worldview which esteems austerity over artistic license.

Indeed, in the novel doubt becomes heroic. It is the necessary grit in the oyster of dreams of transcendence, as the novel's epigraph from Gabriel García Márquez insists: "Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses" (italics in Terrorist). … Here we may return to Paul Berman in Terror and Liberalism, particularly to his critical interaction with Tariq Ramadan's argument about faith and doubt in his book Islam, the West, and the Challenges of Modernity. Berman cites Ramadan's interest in the story—common to both Bible and Quran—of God's command to Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Berman cites Ramadan's view that the space for doubt within Western systems of thought is symbolically initiated in the dilemma prompted by God's order to Abraham, whereas the Quranic version instead emphasizes unquestioning compliance with God's will: "In western religious tradition," states Berman, "there is a space for scepticism and doubt. These two attitudes, scepticism and doubt, are elements of faith—the elements that prove the authenticity of belief in God.… The God of the Old Testament instructs Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, and Abraham doubts the instruction and struggles to resist it, for a little while—and Abraham's doubt and struggle testify to the sincerity of his belief."

Both Berman and Ramadan are attempting to distinguish between different types of religiosity: a Judeo-Christian tradition where doubt has been historically validated and is central to philosophical thought and an Islamic system where questioning (ijtihad) is allowed but where it always operates from a deep well of faith. The issue is not that the distinctions posed are totally invalid but rather that they rely heavily on generalizations about two traditions that actually evolved in tandem from many of the same source materials. In the end, then, the argument is less about the two scriptural sources of the story than about critical reading and desire. Each writer extrapolates from the Abraham story using the resources of exegesis and "literary" reading to substantiate a view of his culture as fundamentally different from its interlocuter. … What we have in Berman and Ramadan is less proof that Islam forecloses doubt and struggle than the desire that it should for the sake of their arguments.

XREF: Connects to debates about comparative religion and Orientalist framing of Islam versus Judeo-Christian traditions, plus the author's broader thesis about how scholars project their own desires onto scripture.

Of course, Updike is here projecting that desiring reading again, offering his characters critical tools most often associated with the Protestant tradition with which to critique the source of their own faith. For some readers, this projection might seem indicative of Updike's "failure" to understand "the Islamic mind." Yet, equally certainly, such a pure, representative "Islamic mind"—constrained and made spotless and doubtless—is hardly likely to be possessed by any human agent in this world. Its creation is another example of the desire to fix and "read" the Other in particular ways, based on essential difference. Ahmad's striving for an always impossible certainty is the real subject matter of the novel.

In turn, Ahmad has his own conflicted reading of the world, the Quran, and the hadiths, which strives for certainty but which secretly craves the "get out clause" that will allow him to abort his mission and save himself from a martyrdom in which he only half believes. Instrumental in his ability to question are the lessons he receives from his imam, Shaikh Rashid. Rashid is usually read as a negative character, and in his final appearance, as Ahmad's qualms grow, he is described as looking "disagreeable" and "ugly" (266, 271). However, he is the one who inserts strategic questioning into the lessons he gives Ahmad, challenging literalist interpretations of the scriptures. He alerts his young charge to possible imperfections in the Quran, caused by human error and misunderstanding. The version of the Quran handed down to us is "in sore need of interpretation," he states, "and interpretations, in the course of fourteen centuries, differ" (105). Ahmad responds with concern: he feels a chasm opening under him. As Rashid takes him through the points of potential dispute, he is, in fact, offering Ahmad an important lesson in critical reading, a skill that effectively brings Ahmad to the point where he can, in the final pages, reject the path of martyrdom prepared for him by others.

DEFINE: Rashid's role illustrates 'critical reading' — questioning literalist, handed-down interpretations through attention to interpretive history and human fallibility.

Thus, Rashid becomes in the end a positive influence, whether deliberate or otherwise. Charlie Chehab from the furniture store is revealed to have been in the pay of the CIA, setting Ahmad up in a sting to capture the wider jihadist group manipulating him. The CIA's plan was to have Charlie pull Ahmad out before the fatal hour, and the murder of Charlie is evidence of the jihadists' ruthless evil. Although there is no evidence that Shaikh Rashid is also an agent provocateur, his intervention allows Ahmad to finally step back from suicide and mass murder. On the night before his planned operation in the Lincoln Tunnel, Ahmad reads the fifty-sixth sura—one of the passages Rashid earlier had him recite—which emphasizes God as a creative rather than a destructive force. As David Simpson says, "What saves the Lincoln Tunnel is a moment of literary-critical scepticism of the sort that Ahmad has indeed shown before and which his teacher Shaikh Rashid has himself modelled for Ahmad despite his apparent intention to train him as a suicide bomber.… Ahmad in his final moment is unable to construe the truth of the holy book as unambiguously endorsing blowing up Jack Levy, even as he had previously resolved to blow up several hundred others who were not looking to die." Ahmad's critical reading leads to his "conversion." Doubt is shown to be a wellspring of positive action, whereas blind faith is depicted as leading only to death.

XREF: Connects to themes in John Updike's Terrorist and broader literary treatments of faith, doubt, and radicalization.

Nevertheless, I would argue that the very shortcomings of these books tell us something about the West's categories and prejudices when it comes to the Muslim Other. … As such, Updike's novel ends in a more uncertain, indeterminate way. We may not have learned much about Islamist extremism, but we have understood something about the other fairytales by which the West seeks to comfort itself.

XREF: Connects to broader postcolonial critique of Western representations of the Other — echoes Said's Orientalism.

It can, of course, be objected that Updike's valorization of doubt belongs to the same tradition of thought as Amis and McEwan's positivist certainties: one might say it provides the soil from which secular beliefs can grow. Perhaps the investment in a kind of Protestant-informed pantheistic humanism limits the novel as a critique of the worldview that might drive a young Muslim to become a suicide bomber. Crucially, there seems no broader geopolitical awareness driving Ahmad's radicalization. Pankaj Mishra remarks of the 9/11 novel: "Struggling to define cultural otherness, … Updike and Amis fail to recognise that belief and ideology remain the unseen and overwhelming forces behind gaudy fantasies about virgins." Nevertheless, I would argue that the very shortcomings of these books tell us something about the West's categories and prejudices when it comes to the Muslim Other. In erecting secularism, modernity, and liberalism as totemic, these novelists have to perform acts of historical selection. They have to arrest the process of cultural evolution—which is driven by change and includes phenomena such as colonialism and immigration—at a particular moment. For Amis and McEwan, the Victorian and modernist nature of their prescriptions—the zombified return of Arnold and Leavis as cultural talismans—shows this particularly clearly. These figures are conscripted for a program of nostalgic cultural purism that is directly Islamophobic.

In this chapter I chart the development of a shift of perspective in British political discourse from an endorsement of multiculturalism to a view of Muslims that is at best suspicious and at worst Islamophobic. I focus on two novels, one from the mid-1990s and the other from the early years of the twenty-first century, both of which contain characters who find themselves forced into a relationship with kinds of Islamic radicalization but which also seem emblematic of a rejection of collective identification in favor of types of individualism. In shaking off the staple requirement that minority writers be representative of their putative communities, these texts reject one of the central tenets of literary multiculturalism that continues to have a highly problematic investment in the notion of texts “speaking for” communities. The novels I examine are Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album (1995) and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003). I argue that in each a rejection of the emphasis on supposed authenticity and what is known as the “burden of representation” in fact mirrors the broader social trend away from multiculturalism as a political ideal based on group identities and the need for recognition of those identities and toward individual autonomy guaranteed by and played out through an economic individualism that aligns with neoliberalism.

XREF: Connects conceptually to discussions of multiculturalism's decline and the 'burden of representation' in postcolonial literary studies. FICTION: The tension between community representation and individual autonomy is a rich theme for fiction exploring identity.

Yet if we see multiculturalism as, in Talal Asad’s words, part of “the attempt to deal with the practical problems encountered in education and the social services—two major institutions of Britain’s welfare state,” we get a very different view. With this emphasis in mind, the rejection of multiculturalism can be seen less as an expression of concern about integration or “British values” and more as part of the neoliberal attack on the idea of social welfare provision itself. In other words, it is as much an economic objection as a culturalist one.

QUESTION: How do economic critiques of welfare and culturalist critiques of multiculturalism interlock in practice in British politics?

These two books present distinct answers to the question of whether it is possible, within the confines of the novel, to articulate Islamic religious identity. The avowedly materialist Black Album, like its predecessor The Buddha of Suburbia, recognizes all identity as experimental and performative; therefore, claims to a core, true religious identity are treated as opportunistic or dishonest. Brick Lane foregoes collective identification for individual self-assertion and a religious faith that, although depicted ambivalently, remains private and unthreatening. Similarly, while Kureishi uses the social comedy and bildungsroman forms to construct a bawdy, rambunctious disavowal of religious purism, Ali offers us supposedly unvarnished realism as a way to draw us in and ensure our sympathy for her downtrodden protagonist.

XREF: Connects to broader industry debates about how minority identity is rendered in contemporary British fiction and whether formal choices encode political positions. SEED: Angle for an essay comparing how a novel's form (comedy vs. realism) shapes reader sympathy for marginalized protagonists.

However, as James Procter notes, “while the inclusive nature of ‘black’ in the 1970s offered a way of overcoming cultural ‘differences,’ it also led to the suppression of difference in presenting a unified front against racism. ‘Black’ was forced to conceal and perpetuate a range of inequalities and tensions internal to the imagined community it drew together.”

XREF: Connects to broader debates about identity categories and strategic essentialism — Spivak's strategic essentialism and critiques of single-axis identity politics.

Sociologist Tariq Modood has remarked on the damaging effects of this homogenization, which tended often to privilege African American models of identification and struggle over the Asian experience. He describes how "when this American anti-racist movement was pursued in Britain, it highlighted a problem, for in Britain there was also a second cleavage: a West Indian–Asian dualism. Despite the different political and cultural histories that this cleavage represented, British anti-racism, having accepted the opposition between black and white, continued to deny any political or anti-racist strategic significance to this internal division."

The demand for "recognition" of hitherto oppressed minority groups began to supplant the more traditional claims for a redistribution of wealth in society. Charles Taylor delineated the political effect of this model in his influential essay "The Politics of Recognition," where he claimed that "our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves."

DEFINE: Articulates Taylor's politics of recognition concept, where misrecognition by society damages individual identity.

However, inasmuch as recognition of the needs of minority groups came to affect civil society in Great Britain, it did so primarily in those areas where social provision—education, housing, and cultural activities—was in the gift of sympathetic local authorities.

The Satanic Verses controversy taught Muslims the need to become organized in defense of their perceived values. It heralded the emergence of a Muslim political identity category because it illustrated how, in Modood's words, "existing forms of recognition and representation were inadequate and marginalised some people who were poorly or not at all represented by the left versus right discourses of the third quarter of the twentieth century."

XREF: Connects to broader literature on identity politics, backlash formation, and how perceived cultural threats mobilize minority groups politically.

Along with this emerging Muslim political identity, the argument goes, there has been a recalibration of racism around matters of culture rather than ethnicity. What is known as "cultural racism" emphasizes languages, beliefs, and traditions over biology and makes them the focus of fear and hostility. Anti-Muslim cultural racism takes on board some of the psychological coordinates of phenotype racism but redirects them to aspects of life and behavior instead of to the body. Michel Wieviorka describes this shift as depending on the construction of Muslims "as a natural category, and [where] their behaviour, real or imagined, is informed in some way or another by an essence, by innate attributions or an almost genetic cultural heritage."

DEFINE: Defines 'cultural racism' as a recalibration of racism toward culture—languages, beliefs, traditions—rather than phenotype or ethnicity.

Kobena Mercer’s classic analysis of the burden of representation on black British cinema in the 1980s identifies a critical requirement that the individual minority film “speak for” the community it represents and from which its creators come. Yet Mercer is also acutely aware of the limitations such expectations impose as well as the broader context in which they take place.

XREF: Relates to discussions of representation and the burden faced by artists from marginalized communities, a recurring theme in cultural criticism.

At heart, this question is about power: “who has power over the apparatus of image-making.” Mercer quotes Judith Williamson’s observation that “the more power any group has to create and wield representation, the less it is required to be representative.” At that time, the expectation that a film “speak for” its community implicitly lay behind multicultural patterns of funding. Minority filmmaking then became a guarantee of multiculturalism; the more such films were produced, the more multiculturalism was demonstrated. At the same time, states Mercer, “the very notion that a single film or cultural artefact can ‘speak for’ an entire socio-ethnic community reinforces the perceived marginality and ‘secondariness’ of that community.”

However, it is equally possible to argue that employing direct realism in a bid to correct misconceptions is to accept a discussion whose terms have been set in advance by those creating the stereotypes.

QUESTION: What alternative framing avoids accepting the stereotype-setters' terms? This opens a path worth exploring.

However, it should be noted that Kureishi describes these shifts from monoculture to multiculture and the kinds of social formation multiculturalism throws up. He is not an advocate for these shifts. As Sara Upstone points out, "To read Kureishi as an upholder of multiculturalism … does not offer the most accurate rendering of his position. For Kureishi does not subscribe to the concept of multiculturalism as a toleration of individual communities and ethnic differences." Thus, although he celebrates the results of multiculturalism as lived experience, he is deeply suspicious of political moves to harness the politics of recognition.

DEFINE: Distinguishes Kureishi's nuanced position: he embraces multiculturalism as lived experience while rejecting it as political ideology.

Indeed, the main message of the novel is encapsulated by the need to "embrace uncertainty" (227). Despite a few somewhat tepid attempts to imagine the attractions of a religious outlook, the novel in the end makes secularism the key guarantor of individual liberty against the Riaz group’s censorious self-righteousness.

Kureishi's main objection to the identity politics that he sees taking over from class orientation is that it freezes identity in false shapes for political convenience. Against this, The Black Album, like its predecessor, records a young man in the process of wrestling with the challenges to identity that youth and new experience raise. True identity is seen as fluid, and the search for an authentic self is more fruitful than the possibility of finding it.

One of his recurring themes is the extent to which identity is a costume, a disguise that can be donned and doffed according to context and personal preference.

XREF: Connects to Goffman's dramaturgical theory of self-presentation and performative identity work.

That said, it would seem, from both The Black Album and Kureishi's subsequent statements, that the author identifies a danger to freedom and art in the politics of Muslim cultural identity that did not exist in older models, which had a more encouraging view of self-expression. Thus, cultural identities tend less to be truly organic expressions of belonging or affiliation than marriages of convenience encouraged by the political ideologies of the time.

XREF: Connects to critiques of identity politics and the constructed nature of group affiliation in postcolonial and cultural studies.

This exchange encapsulates all that has gone before and puts Shahid (and Kureishi) in the company of those writers who in the days after 9/11 were to reassert the liberal universalism of the Western literary tradition as a main line of defense against Islamic terrorism. Here, I would draw attention to the way in which Shahid's reply underwrites the novel's broader disavowal of positions that are seen as a threat to foundational cultural values. … The rearticulation of the notion of an unfettered, free-floating artist, responsible to no one but himself, is juxtaposed against a kind of fanaticism in the Other that is central to contemporary Islamophobia: the herd mentality, the absence of critical thought, the propensity for violence.

DEFINE: Describes 'liberal universalism of the Western literary tradition' as positioned in defense against Islamic terrorism, framing the free-floating artist ideal against a caricatured fanatic other.

Moreover, we might claim that Kureishi's lack of sympathy for Islamic collective-identity positions as symbolized by Riaz's group actually undermines his argument for the novel as a space of jostling views, many voices, and dialogue. Ruvani Ranasinha has observed how "The Black Album's monolithic portrait of the Islamic believers does not articulate a range of heterogeneous voices on its central issues," meaning there is no genuine polyphony.

Put simply, one might say that the satirical social comedy form, of which The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album are preeminent examples, inscribes a conservatism that is not only uninterested in rendering the motivations and solidarities of the Riaz group but also actively hostile to them precisely because they are inherently collective.

The Black Album’s conventionally modern resolution fails to disturb those negative opinions that many readers in the mid-1990s—and most certainly since then—might have about the growth of Muslim identity claims. To that extent, the ending has a curiously slack, comforting quality, with hero and heroine driving off into the sunset, having vanquished the foes of both repression and domesticity. This avowedly individualist ending is most certainly not an endorsement of multiculturalism; indeed, all the damage to which Shahid and Deedee have been witness can be read as a product of the misguided indulgence that has made such outrageous claims possible.

XREF: Connects to debates about literary endings and political commitment in fiction, similar to critiques of Rushdie and postcolonial novel conclusions.

Nancy Fraser describes how feminism took an intersectionist approach, allying with other emancipatory movements around class, race, and sexuality to challenge structural subordination of women. However, in the Reaganite–Thatcherite 1980s, feminism was confronted with a very different political animus that prioritized privatization, deregulation, and the elimination of capital controls and that emphasized competition rather than welfare. In this context, Fraser sees feminist ideals being resignified, surrendering their broader claims for social justice in favor of the rhetoric of recognition. Feminism became absorbed into identity politics, and issues of culture were elevated above those of political economy. Out of this shift emerged “a new romance of female advancement and gender justice” under neoliberalism that overlooked the grotesque inequalities, job insecurity, low wages, and negligible welfare provision resulting from reforms designed to promote individualism and discourage broader solidarities.

XREF: Echoes the broader scholarship on neoliberal co-optation of emancipatory movements (e.g., Brown, Harvey). Fraser's resignification thesis resonates with critiques of identity politics displacing class analysis. SEED: Potential essay angle: how contemporary women's-advancement discourse (Lean In feminism, corporate DEI) mirrors the 1980s pattern of delegating structural critique while embracing individualist meritocracy.

In subsequent meetings, identity markers harden: some girls who attended the first meeting in hijab have now "upgraded to burkhas" (279); discussions center on whether certain types of behavior are "Islamic" or not; and personal rivalry leads to deep disagreements over policy and approach. The Bengal Tigers' agenda threatens to become more sectarian and international, marked by concern for suffering Muslims around the world and sympathy for violent direct action but also characterized by a kind of Muslim exceptionalism that the novel is clearly critical of. Even the heady sense of power Nazneen experiences by attending their meetings and feeling she can at last act to influence world affairs is offset by the omniscient narrator's insistence that this sense of power is in fact simply a compensation for unfulfilled personal longings. Of Nazneen's sense of sympathy for the Muslim victims of violence in Chechnya and Palestine, we are told that "she mistook the sad weight of longing in her stomach for sorrow" (244).

XREF: Connects to the novel's broader critique of ideological commitment as compensation for personal emptiness.

Moreover, the denouement brings Nazneen and her friends closer to that mode of independent individualism noted by Christina Scharff in her study of young Western women who reject feminism as a label, preferring to identify with choice and personal autonomy as opposed to collectivist action among women. Interestingly, Scharff finds that these young women’s sense of agency—and thus their assertion that feminism is no longer relevant to them—is juxtaposed against and therefore established through the argument that Muslim women in particular do not have such agency, being victims of patriarchal cultures and therefore more in need of the feminism these women have outgrown.

XREF: Connects to postcolonial feminist critiques of how Western feminism positions the 'other' woman, echoing Spivak and Mohanty.

Taken together, The Black Album and Brick Lane offer a strong rejection of what they depict as the misguided channels of minority-group community assertion. In both cases, political multiculturalism is shown to lead to the dead ends of censorship and personal oppression—especially of women. … For Nazneen in Ali's novel, the celebration of autonomy and feminist agency comes at the expense of the rejection of community politics and an endorsement of the entrepreneurial spirit: a path that has come to be increasingly valorized as social modes of support have been deliberately attenuated by successive governments. This movement from identity to individualism also seems characteristic of a broader social shift in ways of looking at empowerment. … However, in an era when Islamophobic policies are increasingly being adopted by governments in the United States and Europe, there must come a point where the targeted disciplining of those who are not deemed acceptable (and accepting) free-market subjects produces direct conflict. It is not the job of novelists to produce programmatic blueprints for the coming struggle. Nevertheless, in novels such as The Black Album and Brick Lane we may see a roadmap that at least marks out part of the route by which we arrived here.

QUESTION: The claim that political multiculturalism inevitably leads to censorship and female oppression is debatable; worth interrogating against counterexamples where multicultural policies expanded rather than restricted agency. XREF: Connects to broader debates about identity politics versus liberal individualism, Susan Okin's 'Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?', and critiques of neoliberal co-optation of feminist empowerment.

Muslim misery memoirs partake in large measure of the culturalist discourse that sees Muslims and Muslim lands as inherently different and threatening. They depict Islam as a source of oppression, drawing on an Orientalist historical template that for good measure also evokes recognizable types of totalitarian enemy—Nazism, communism—and the kinds of oppression of minorities and women the West has supposedly eradicated. Hence, they inscribe the regions they depict somewhat schizophrenically: as a potential threat to those freedoms cherished in the West if left unconfronted and as so backward that they are rendered supine in the face of a neoimperial project of rescue and modernization. The books specialize in moral certainties and primary colors when it comes to character and background. Their overarching message appears to be that rescue by the West, which is to say the U.S. military, cannot come soon enough for the benighted figures who haunt their pages and who suffer all manner of deprivation and abuse in the name of Islam. Moreover, as I show, such texts operate through a kind of exotic metonymy in which details of life under Islamic oppression come to stand in for a whole culture, reduced to certain extreme essences that operate to evacuate history and keep the reader firmly focused on personalized narratives that always claim greater political resonance.

Women often play a particular role in Muslim misery memoirs as carriers of cultural baggage and the focus of Western sympathy. The Muslim woman becomes the object of discourses by both modern secularists (including some feminists) and Islamic conservatives and fundamentalists: her body, the confines of her life, and her mode of dress being read for what they supposedly yield about the essential qualities of the cultures in which the she lives. In that sense, she becomes a stereotype, a fixed and unchanging signifier of timeless modes of life.

XREF: Connects to postcolonial critiques of the 'oppressed Muslim woman' trope, such as Lila Abu-Lughod's 'Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?' and Chandra Mohanty's 'Under Western Eyes.'

Lila Abu-Lughod takes up and extends this point, indicating how such “culturalist” explanations for women’s oppression—which lay the blame squarely at the door of Islam—conveniently ignore the longer, entangled histories of the evolution of certain social systems, a story that, given the legacies of colonialism, the Cold War, and globalization, ought really to include Western support for the repressive regimes that have allowed such ideologies to thrive. In works such as those I analyze here, which totally omit any consideration of previous U.S. interference in each nation’s affairs, selective decontextualization allows the author to attribute all the abuses we see to a brute named “Islam” that works everywhere to curtail human rights.

XREF: Connects to Edward Said's critique of Orientalism and the broader literature on how Western discourse constructs Islam as a monolithic explanation rather than engaging with political and historical complexity. SEED: Potential essay angle: how decontextualization as a rhetorical device operates in contemporary media coverage of Muslim-majority countries, paralleling Abu-Lughod's analysis.

Although I think this may be one effect of these books, it could be argued that their very qualities of rawness and at times crude propagandism actually distract from their endeavor to create fully convincing fictive simulations from which relevant lessons can be drawn for our "real world." This distraction has to do with the matter of mimesis, the way the books make their truth claims, how they manage their reality effects. Exploring this issue also requires that we consider questions of genre because it, too, conditions how we receive and interpret literary texts.

DEFINE: Explains how mimesis and reality effects connect to genre expectations, tying rhetorical technique to interpretive outcome.

My point is, rather, that each text stakes its truth claims in part on the supposed objectivity guaranteed by the techniques of literary mimesis—that is to say, they create believable, three-dimensional worlds for the characters to inhabit and in which readers can immerse themselves—and in part on the expectations engendered by the rules of the genre to which the text belongs. These features are then underwritten, as in the cases of Reading Lolita in Tehran and The Kite Runner, by the supposed authenticity of the author as a spokesperson hailing from that region of the globe under scrutiny. Significantly, only The Kite Runner claims to be a novel. Reading Lolita in Tehran is subtitled A Memoir in Books.

Now domiciled in the United States, Azar Nafisi and Khaled Hosseini can be read as the kind of "native informer" Hamid Dabashi identifies as crucial to the self-justification of neoimperialism. Dabashi says of such writers: "Faced with the Islamophobic conditions of their new homes, they have learnt the art of simultaneously acknowledging and denying their Muslim origins. They speak English with an accent that confirms their authenticity to their white interlocutors." Dabashi's polemic captures the way in which books such as Reading Lolita in Tehran and The Kite Runner peddle images that find a ready audience in the contemporary West. However, I wish to go further and consider how the texts' formal ambiguities undercut their otherwise selective and simplistic worldviews.

XREF: Connects to broader postcolonial criticism of self-Orientalizing and the 'native informer' concept, echoing debates around writers like Salman Rushdie and Lila Abu-Lughod. QUESTION: Worth probing: can authenticity be performed for white audiences while the text's formal complexities resist containment? The author hints at going 'further' here.

I would argue yet another level of complication is introduced into Nafisi's text by the canonical English and American novels it interpolates and comments upon. While lending a further aura of authority, these borrowings point up shortcomings in the rather narrow, judgmental perspective the narrator-teacher displays. In the end, it is not so much a case of generic ambiguity or transgression as of generic incompatibility, where contending elements in the narrative undermine and pull away from the central ideological message.

XREF: Relates to broader debates about how intertextual borrowing functions rhetorically in memoir and political writing, and how literary devices can work against an author's stated intent.

Yet, says Dabashi, perhaps the text's greatest sin is its evacuation of history: "What is impossible to miss is the almost total absence of any sort of Iranian context.… There is not a single word as to why millions of people poured into streets and risked (and often lost) their lives to topple one of the most savage military dictatorships in modern history. It is as if the sole purpose of the 1979 revolution had been to inconvenience Nafisi."

The reader will find none of this crucial historical context mentioned in Reading Lolita in Tehran. Not only would it distract from the text's portrayal of the grim-faced psychopaths governing contemporary Iran as archetypal monstrosities that have somehow sprung fully formed from the darkest reaches of the human unconscious, but it might also give those forces a degree of historical rationale and taint the utopian view of the United States. One might say that Nafisi's use of the memoir form has a strategic advantage here, allowing for a ground-level personal perspective that need not be concerned with much beyond the phenomenological experience of living under a clear and ever-present tyranny—certainly not with the untidy twists and turns of history.

XREF: Relates to broader discussions of how memoir as a genre can selectively frame political narratives and implicitly serve ideological ends.

The lack of freedom in Iran is experienced on a systemic level and prompts small gestures of rebellion—modifications in dress and forbidden activities in the private space of Nafisi's apartment—that testify to the attraction of that which is being denied. Nafisi talks about the sometimes absurd effect of censorship on the cultural items they can access. This censorship is part of a broader set of postrevolutionary purges characterized by an anti-intellectualism that bursts out in the temporary closures of the universities and the harassment and even murder of artists and intellectuals.

Nafisi's particular trick is not only to snuff out any possibility of feminist practice or resistance from within Islam but also to disregard all kinds of feminist activity that does not originate in the West and coincide with secular values.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of Orientalist feminism and the way Western secular framings flatten complex local resistance movements.

Although the book seems at first glance to be a targeted indictment of the instrumentalization of religion by the Islamic Republic, in fact it attacks Islam as a whole for legitimizing oppression. There is no clear view of whether politically ambitious clerics have hijacked the religion or whether the religion itself is a tool historically shaped for use by aggressors—although the latter is implied by Nafisi's wholesale dismissal of Islam in all its manifestations. Nowhere does Islam feature as a spiritually fulfilling site of comfort, only occasionally as a desperate security blanket resorted to by those seeking protection against social suspicion on the one hand and the unnerving challenges of real autonomy on the other.

I would argue that the real political statement of the book—and hence its Islamophobia—in the end lies less in the strident denunciation of the Islamic Republic of Iran than in the universalist understanding of the meaning and value of literature that is proposed. The issue is not that Nafisi's readings of each of the great novels she teaches are somehow Islamophobic or wrong. It is rather that these readings nestle against a uncompromisingly painted backdrop in which the "high" cultural artifacts of the West are deemed always superior to those of Iran—save perhaps for a few treasures of Persian literature from centuries ago—and in which the values these artifacts enshrine are used very markedly to emphasize Western culture and, by inference, the West's social developmental trajectory as the norm, in comparison with which the Islamic East is always aberrant and inferior.

XREF: Connects to postcolonial critiques of universalism from scholars like Said, and debates about whether canonical Western literature smuggles in civilizational judgments.

The values enshrined in the great novels of the Western canon are claimed to operate irrespective of social, geographical, or any other context, and their meanings are claimed to be singular and unequivocal. Nafisi articulates a deeply conservative view of literature and criticism in keeping with those other near-contemporary volleys in the so-called curriculum wars of the 1980s and 1990s. As a response to the new, vigorous assertion of black rights as well as broader patterns of postimperial population movement, questions were raised from the 1970s on about the representativeness of the established canon of great literary works as an educational tool in the multicultural societies of the West. … In this moment of multiculturalism, cultural pluralism was placed against melting-pot assimilationism. In response, a conservative backlash accused multiculturalists of introducing the taint of politics into the sacred and supposedly neutral space of Great Art.

XREF: Connects to the 'curriculum wars' and culture wars debates of the 1980s-90s; parallels Allan Bloom's 'Closing of the American Mind' and Hirsch's cultural literacy controversy.

Even some of the images have a familiar ring; James wrote to Edith Wharton of the war as a "crash of Civilisation" (quoted on 216). But Nafisi also speaks for James, too, making him acknowledge "Europe's depravity, it's fatigue with its own past," sounding for all the world like Donald Rumsfeld lambasting "Old Europe" for its skepticism about the new imperial realities of the early twenty-first century. This whole peculiar insertion makes sense only as a coded engagement with issues of courage and a sense of civilization under threat that form part of the patriotic rhetoric of the Bush era.

XREF: Connects literary criticism to contemporary political rhetoric, linking post-9/11 American discourse with readings of James and Wharton.

Nafisi's Islamophobia exists in her text's surface-level endorsement of the neoconservative culturalist suspicion of Islamic societies as hostile and inferior and operates through aesthetic value judgments as much as through a depiction of the miasma of Orwellian tyranny that pervades Iran and overshadows the lives of her students. Nafisi proposes that the Euro-American novel embodies certain political potentialities—democracy through polyphony, dialogicality, and choice—even as she claims that the greatest novels are apolitical. Moreover, her attribution of these qualities to each of her chosen writers exists in tension with the stark fact that they are nowhere to be found in her own work; she always, but always, has the last word.

XREF: Relates to critiques of Reading Lolita in Tehran and post-9/11 neoconservative framings of Islamic societies in literary criticism.

As elsewhere, we are primed to interpret this observation as a comment on the proprietorial relationship of the Islamic Republic to its citizens, especially its women. Yet it also serves accurately to describe Nafisi's own relationship to all the characters that frequent the pages of her memoir, including those whom she calls "my girls" (51). We are told that true novelistic villains, as exemplified by Mrs. Newsome, the tyrannical matriarch in James's novel The Ambassadors, have "dictatorial minds" (249). Nabokov's skill and his "beautiful language" (41) unnervingly lead us into complicity with this monster, who is "a villain because he lacked curiosity about other people and their lives … Humbert, like most dictators was interested only in his own version of other people" (48). Here for once, in a text that constantly strives to keep all its elements firmly within its rigid grip, is an irony that manages to be entirely unself-conscious.

XREF: Parallels the reader's interest in how authority operates interpersonally versus institutionally — echoes themes in literary criticism about authorial control over characters.

Matthew Potolsky offers an insight into this process that has much to tell us about how Muslim misery memoirs gain the assent of their Western audience: "Details in realist works highlight the artist's observational fidelity.… Yet the realist detail is also a highly conventional stylistic technique. Jakobson, for example, argues that realist details are based on … metonymy. Unlike metaphor, which compares dissimilar things, metonymy substitutes one thing for something associated or close to it.… Realist metonymies create an entire world by way of such associations: one or two details imply the possibility of infinite details 'outside' the scene that might have been described." Realist details in Muslim misery memoirs rely on such associations, but they are always deeply imbued with a particular kind of exoticism.

DEFINE: Distinguishes metonymy (substitution by association) from metaphor (comparison of dissimilar things) as the engine of realist world-building.

Huggan argues that in the exotic "authenticity is invariably manufactured to meet a set of ideological needs." It is judged according to certain criteria set by the dominant viewing culture, which include "the perceived need to recapture a sense of threatened cultural identity …; the desire to rejuvenate one culture by siphoning off the attributes of another; the repressed wish to save face, or salve conscience, by praising a culture … that one has previously insulted; and so on." … However, none of these explanations quite captures the resonance of the exotic gaze when focused on the Islamic world more broadly. Here, rather than rejuvenation, belated praise, or the comforting lure of food or fabrics, the exotic is affected directly by politics. With Muslim misery memoirs, the Western publishing industry and its readers are attracted to books that claim to give us the inside story on Muslim cultures because they seem to offer a handle on what is both alien and threatening. The artifacts of "soft" exotic culture, such as local cuisine and folk practices, are packaged attractively to emphasize a common yet culturally unfamiliar humanity, but they are always also either implicitly or explicitly contrasted with the repressive surrounding dominant political, social, and religious formation of Islam. In the modern "global village," items from India, the Caribbean, and parts of Africa lend themselves quite readily to conventional exotic commodification. For Muslim societies, in contrast, the Western desire to claim and domesticate them remains but is always marked by an Islamophobic estrangement that gives that desire a certain urgency and aligns it with existing discourses of civilizational threat.

Truth is opposed to lies: innocence to guilt; freedom to tyranny; cowardice to bravery; optimistic, fair-minded America to melancholic, self-destructive Afghanistan; and action to the rather slippery and unsatisfactory activity of writing. Encompassing all is the contrast of good and evil, invoked at the start by Rahim Khan's call to Amir, urging him to return to Afghanistan, where "there is a way to be good again" (2, emphasis in original). … Direct, plain language once more adds to the power of this retrospective rite-of-passage novel. Amir tells us: "I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975" (1).

The Islamophobia in these texts is often identified on the level of content and message. I have tried to show in this chapter that aspects of form—such as the use of omniscience or the promotion or downplaying of different voices—may also underpin this project but that, as often as not, these same tactics expose the effort involved in constructing a unified vision supportive of power agendas. The texts are always conflicted, even as they make their self-confident claims to credibility.

XREF: Connects to poststructuralist and narratological critique of omniscient narration as an ideological device, e.g., narratology work on focalization and unreliable narration.

Among the innovations introduced after 9/11 was the National Security Exit–Entry Registration System (NSEERS), which streamlined the documentation, detention, and eventual deportation of Muslims from a prepared list of twenty-five largely Muslim countries. “Even more sinister,” remark Neil Smith and Setha Low, “the Patriot Act (2001) thoroughly spatialized its circumspection of the public sphere with the invention of ‘homeland security,’ as a cabinet level preoccupation. Consequently, the domestic public sphere suffered a clampdown, with library accounts, university computers, bank accounts and other modes of daily communication placed under unprecedented surveillance.”

Space is demarcated in particular ways, in keeping with a longer American literary tradition—from The Great Gatsby to a raft of novels by African Americans, such as Richard Wright’s Native Son, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Ann Petry’s The Street, and James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain—where social and racial prejudice and segregation vie with the promised opportunity to remake the self offered by the city.

XREF: Connects to the overlapping themes in Gatsby, Native Son, Invisible Man, The Street, and Go Tell It on the Mountain — a rich cross-canonical thread on segregated urban opportunity that could enrich other readings.

Glossing this idea, Neil Campbell and Alistair Kean add the note of conflict: “a city is a gathering of meanings in which people invest their interpretation and seek to create their own (hi)story,” forming “a chain of meanings in competition with one another, with certain interpretations emerging at specific points in time with more authority and subsequent power than others.” This useful linking of space and stories reminds us that both phenomena depend on the establishment and transgression of frontiers; fiction depends on characters straining against or being able to overcome barriers to their progress, just as frontiers exist to impede, at least temporarily, movements in space.

XREF: Connects to narrative theory and literary analysis; the frontier-as-constraint idea echoes Proppian narrative functions and structuralist approaches to plot as obstacle-overcoming.

After a menacing exchange, silence descends: “No one spoke. They waited. In architecture, space was material to be shaped, even created. For these men, the material was silence. Silence like water in which you could drown, the absence of talk as constricting as the absence of air. Silence that sucked at your will until you came spluttering to the surface confessing your sins or inventing them.” Couched in the spatial metaphor of suffocation and drowning, Mo’s feelings testify to a sense of spatial as well as legal disadvantage as he languishes in the interrogation room with the natural light blocked out “to create the ambience of a cell.” Mo reflects: “Someone among them understood the manipulation of space.”

XREF: Connects to broader techniques of psychological coercion and spatial control in institutional power.

Yet The Submission presents us with a quandary in that "tactical" interventions are being made by two antithetical factions. Rival groups, proand anti-Mo and his design, square up at the site; Muslim women's hijabs are pulled off; and Muslim communities organize patrols in their defense. Considering all this in the context of the broader post-9/11 clampdown on Muslims, we might say that Islamophobic power "strategies" can still deploy disruptive "tactics," encouraging a "superstitious" investment in Ground Zero to further agendas of Muslim marginalization and even expulsion that are already well advanced elsewhere.

XREF: Connects to de Certeau's strategy/tactics distinction the author is invoking.

Mo's previous determination to allow the design to speak for itself, in tension with the way extreme readings of this space have proliferated in absurd and unexpected ways, means that by this stage no one is really listening; Mo's version of its meaning is now only one of many, with no more authority than any other.

Matters are further complicated by our discovery—very late in the novel—that the garden has indeed been influenced by the Islamic gardens of the East. Its lines recall the description we are given of Babur Gardens, a park built for the first Mughal emperor, which Mo stumbled across on a post-9/11 visit to Kabul. Tim Gauthier suggests that this late revelation might encourage in the reader misgivings about Mo, a character with whom we have developed an intimate relationship courtesy of the omniscient third-person technique that is free to swoop down into the consciousnesses of the main characters in turn. In fact, we are never really in much doubt about Mo's intentions, which are benevolent but perhaps complacent and colored by personal ambition.

QUESTION: How does the late revelation of the Babur Gardens influence shift reader sympathy toward Mo? Worth exploring whether the narrative deliberately withholds this to complicate judgment.

So movements beyond one's accustomed space carry a cost. Yet so too does intransigence. Mo, the Muslim American architect whose family migrated from India, reflects at one point that he seems "bound to disturb every space he entered" (197). Yet his refusal to explain and interpret his design need not be read simply as egotistical misjudgment or a lack of flexibility.

In Islamophobic discourse, asserts Jamil, "Muslims are asked to soothe the fears of the west [sic] and to defuse their anxieties by reassuring them that they are 'good Muslims' or 'moderate Muslims,' not the violent, blowing-up-things kind of 'bad Muslims.' However, both 'good Muslims' and 'bad Muslims' confirm and validate the superior position of the west." In other words, what Claire is seeking is the validation not simply of her views but also of the epistemological categories on which they are based, in which American innocence must be tacitly endorsed by the Muslim, who is required to "prove" good intentions that would otherwise remain in question.

DEFINE: Explains the Islamophobic 'good Muslim/bad Muslim' binary and how both poles serve Western hegemony.

As a Bangladeshi woman, Asma’s ability to traverse even the immigrant spaces of New York is severely circumscribed. She rarely ventures out from her home in Little Dhaka, as their part of Brooklyn is known, considering Manhattan “like another country” (71). Moreover, in a move that perhaps indicates that The Submission, despite its concern for stereotyping in the media, does not always escape stereotypes of its own, the restraints on Asma are depicted as cultural as well as Islamophobic. She begins as the archetypal oppressed Muslim woman, cowed by the patriarchal conventions of her community. Her tentative attempts to break free of tradition are crushed under the weight of convention and respectability—as when she attempts to rescue a neighbor from domestic abuse but finds her efforts rejected even by the victim, whose concern is primarily for reputation.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of how well-meaning fiction still falls into tropes about oppressed Muslim women, relevant to literary criticism and representation debates.

So The Submission is a novel that explores entrenched positions but also digs down to expose the dangers and doubts that often lie beneath uncompromising public posturing. Moreover, as Sonia Baelo-Allué has observed, focalization that shifts between the main protagonists sheds deliberately uneven light on the debates, producing a “constant crisscrossing of perspectives.”

XREF: Relates to narrative theory techniques—focalization as a means of creating moral complexity, echoing Nabokov criticism or Genette's work.

Yet despite—or perhaps because of—this urge to measure and judge warring positions against one another, The Submission ends up falling into the classic liberal trap of seeing both sides of an argument but being unable to accept the necessity of choosing between them. For instance, the text’s urge to recuperate its Muslim characters onto the “good Muslim” side of the “good Muslim/bad Muslim” balance sheet merely leaves the criterion in place. There is never any chance that Mo will turn out to be a “bad Muslim” in these terms, so the book’s much-vaunted ambivalence is slightly bogus. Although it aims to get beyond these categories, its deployment of representative types does not, in the end, challenge conventions of framing. It is more successful in understanding Mo’s intransigence and hostility as a piece of defensive self-stereotyping and a (perhaps necessary) tactical betrayal of his better judgment. Yet the very fact that Mo is brought to explain at all—after such determined resistance—indicates a degree of uncertainty about where the reader’s sympathies may be heading. The explanation seems slightly out of character and more like part of a deliberate liberal softening by Waldman to make Mo more “acceptable” to us by diluting the enigma.

This structuring liberalism is apparent elsewhere, too. Among those Muslims supporting Mo are MACC members and their leader, Issam Malik. MACC’s interest in co-opting Mo for its other, related campaigns is seen as intrusive and reprehensible, and Malik—whom Mo views as “an unctuous phony” (173)—ends up on the lecture-tour circuit, butting heads with Debbie Dawson in a grotesque form of political gladiatorial pantomime. Yet aligning MACC with the multiple, interconnected forces of Islamophobia tearing into Mo implies some kind of parity—as well as impugning the work of MACC’s real-life counterpart, the Council on American–Islamic Relations—when it is surely disingenuous to suggest that the two sides are equivalent in terms of reach, media access, or influence.

QUESTION: Worth examining how fictional analogues of real organizations (MACC/CAIR) risk false equivalence in satire.

Finally, the book’s liberal utopianism is evident in its epilogue. Not only is Mo now rich and internationally celebrated, with a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Architecture, but we are told, “American Muslims were now, if not embraced, accepted. Trusted. Their rights unquestioned” (287). Just like that! With no explanation. Islamophobia is here mapped onto and equated with all those previous struggles against discrimination, from anti-Catholicism to civil rights, in a patriotic reiteration of America’s inherent capacity to integrate and forgive. Nothing is said about the struggles, bloodshed, and loss of life that always accompany this drawn-out and painful process. American Muslims have somehow effortlessly entered the sunny uplands of the future, conveyed there by some painless magical process we are not permitted to witness.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of Whig history and the 'arc of justice' narrative, which flatten the violent struggles of civil rights and other liberation movements into a sanitized march toward progress.

An inquisitor dubbed “Grizzly” pursues a line of questioning based on the presumption that Chuck, as someone of Muslim background, has some sort of “authentic” inside knowledge about terrorism: “he figured I would have special insight into the phenomenon—knowledge of the relevant fatwa, or some verse in the Koran—just as a black man, any black man, should be privy to black-on-black violence or the allure of a forty ounce” (115).

XREF: Connects to broader discourse on racial essentialism and the burden of representation placed on marginalized individuals.

In contrast to the painless transition to Muslim acceptance offered at the end of Waldman’s novel, Naqvi’s take on social “progress” is much more acerbic: “I understood that just like three black men were gangbangers, and three Jews a conspiracy, three Muslims had become a sleeper cell. And later, much later, the pendulum would swing back, and everybody would celebrate progress, the storied tradition of accommodation, on TV talk shows and posters in middle schools” (121).

XREF: Contrasts with Waldman's more hopeful treatment of Muslim acceptance, per the surrounding essay.

However, in view of what has gone before in the novel, the epilogue perhaps more compellingly gestures toward the continued allure of New York as the great melting-pot city for all those migrants who come to buy into its dream, as yet unaware of the modern carceral nightmare it has become.

It would, I think, be misguided to claim that Naqvi's narrative is somehow more "authentic" than Waldman's—to do so would be to fall into the trap of seeking that ethnic representativeness on which Chuck's interrogation is based. Waldman's book is in some ways more ambitious in that it confronts directly the public mechanisms by which Muslims are marginalized. Even so, Naqvi's novel shows itself less inclined to settle for a liberal, individualist, broad-based empathy—a weighing up of pros and cons—that is perhaps the price of taking a more synoptic approach. Both novels acknowledge that the ownership of space is what is at stake after 9/11 and that the ability to shape one's environment and move around in it is suddenly thrown into doubt.

XREF: Connects to broader post-9/11 literary criticism around surveillance, mobility, and spatial control.

What emerges most clearly, though, is that those Muslim figures with the most tenuous hold on America—the undocumented, such as Asma and Inam—and those who suddenly become unemployed and therefore vulnerable—such as Chuck—are always the ones who experience Islamophobia most directly.

XREF: Connects to intersectionality theory, showing how precarity compounds religious discrimination.

In his address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush effectively inaugurated the war on terror by offering an uncompromising ultimatum: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Striking the keynote in a civilizational struggle, this speech and others like it allowed for an understanding of political conflict that took on a moral flavor and that—despite the notoriously porous nature of the terrorist threat—conveniently situated the conflict in the known and more manageable confines of nations. In its geopolitical guise, the ultimatum indirectly created the conditions for Islamophobia to be played out over the globe as well as among the multicultural countries of the West. In aesthetic terms, it prepared fertile ground for the thriller genre, in particular the spy thriller, with its interest in the possession of knowledge, covert action, group rivalries, and paranoid visions of the nation under threat.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on post-9/11 culture, the securitization of Islam, and how political discourse shapes literary genres. SEED: Possible essay angle: tracing how a single presidential speech's binaries ('with us or against us') got translated into genre-fiction conventions like the paranoid spy thriller.

This reading therefore stands in opposition to conventional perspectives that identify an inherent conservatism in a genre that relies to a large degree on linearity—the deferred but ultimately guaranteed revelation of secrets—and that pits the agents of the nation-state against forces that often have apocalyptic designs on its citizens, drawing the reader into an imaginative complicity that in the war-on-terror context is often overtly Islamophobic.

XREF: Connects to debates about the ideological politics of genre fiction, particularly the thriller/novel of revelation and its relationship to post-9/11 state power.

However, I would argue that it is the thriller’s inevitable and inherent juxtaposition of contending ideologies that gives it the potential for a dialogic engagement that moves beyond the reductive binaries of war-on-terror discourse and that, within its limited means, exposes and challenges Islamophobic assumptions.

I also argue that John Le Carré, Dan Fesperman, and Richard Flanagan are interested in testing and transgressing discursive constructs of essential difference and—directly or indirectly, successfully or otherwise—challenging the Islamophobic truisms that emerge from the mentalities these constructs foster.

Moreover, all three are about stories: battles over truth, where contending versions of events and motives clash. Each novel asks what happens to the truth when it falls prey to political expediency. Characters operate in a market for ideas and information, where the “customers” are either intelligence agencies or newspaper editors or media consumers. In each, characters end up being sacrificed to meet the demands of certain dominant sets of interest.

In an essay lambasting the war-on-terror thriller's role in normalizing state-sanctioned terror, David Holloway has argued that the shift in political ethics that led to torture at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib as well as to practices such as extraordinary rendition, waterboarding, and so on has been legitimized in popular-culture forms that often make these practices part of a desperate race to save innocent lives … For Holloway, readers of thrillers occupy a "thoroughly abject, feminized [sic] position … in relation to what they read." We enjoy such novels because we know "that our abjection as readers is merely the prelude to enlightenment and 'mastery' over the fictive world," which will come with conventional closure and disclosure. In other words, we are passive counters in a "pleasurable process of interpellation." … Yet even setting aside the curious gendered language Holloway uses to indicate the thriller reader's supposed passivity, his direct translation of coercive imperialism into the structure of genre literature, resulting in a willing abasement of the reader to imperial ideology, is surely too totalizing. Quite apart from the general fact that narrative pleasures are more variegated and ambiguous than Holloway allows, there is no obvious reason why questions of form should simply reflect wider political preoccupations so directly. As we have already seen in this book, at best they refract them. … However, in the generalizing conclusions Holloway reaches there is no place for what one might think of as those more liberal thrillers—texts such as John Le Carré's A Most Wanted Man (2008)—that expose the human cost of practices such as torture and the targeted abduction and extradition of stateless Muslims as well as the machinations, careerism, and duplicity of Western security services.

XREF: Connects to ongoing debates about the political valence of genre fiction and reader reception theory.

A century or more ago politics on the international scale was one of the great themes of fiction, as War and Peace, The Charterhouse of Parma and dozens of other major novels attest. But with the twentieth century serious fiction shifted towards the psychological, the novel of inner rather than outer development. Kafka, Joyce, Lawrence and Faulkner turned toward the individual mind as the great subject of fiction, and even writers intensely conscious of political forces, such as Camus, tended to treat them primarily as aspects of the self.… Not only are political forces created by the minds that perceive them, but the true focus of fiction is on the perception itself. The mind shapes the political world.

XREF: Connects to the broader debate about the 'political novel' and the decline of epic scope in modernism.

A Most Wanted Man sees Le Carré exploring the human cost of the practice of targeted abduction of Muslim individuals known as "extraordinary rendition." … At the start, Issa has made his way to Hamburg, having escaped from detention and torture in Russia, where he has been falsely implicated in radical Islamist activity. But Issa is also the illegitimate son of a now deceased Soviet army general who has lodged in an illicit account at Brue Frères Bank the ill-gotten gains made by looting, raping, and murdering his way through Chechnya during the 1980s. These so-called Lippizaner accounts—where "black" money can slowly be made to turn "white"—have been set up by Tommy Brue's father and predecessor as bank president at the behest of the British secret service in return for General Karpov's willingness to trade secrets during the dying days of the Soviet Union. … However, Annabel and Tommy's hopes are ultimately dashed when outside forces from MI5 and the CIA—with the connivance of the more conservative elements of the German hierarchy—gate-crash the transfer meeting, sabotaging Bachmann's plans to "turn" Abdullah in order to trace the real terrorists. The last we see of Issa and Abdullah is as they are bundled into the back of an unmarked van before, we presume, being "rendered" to an undisclosed location for rather more heavy-handed treatment.

QUESTION: Le Carré dramatizes how rendition sweeps up the falsely accused — worth investigating real parallel cases cited in reporting on the post-9/11 rendition program. DEFINE: The term 'extraordinary rendition' is defined here through its fictional illustration: targeted abduction of Muslim individuals to undisclosed locations.

The book is, thus, in part about the sins of fathers and how they can return to haunt the present, the personal colliding with the political to produce what the novel describes as "untidy history." At the start, Hamburg is a city still trying to expiate its own guilt at playing host to the 9/11 plotters, the so-called Hamburg Cell. As the story progresses, the different responses to the resulting political pressures are played out in the complex internal politics of the German intelligence and security communities— a running feud "between those determined to defend civil rights at all costs, and those determined to curtail them in the name of national security" (103).

In addition to the difficulty of establishing Issa's “guilt” in relation to terrorism—his background is murky and Russian reports unreliable—the novel is concerned with the construction of a narrative of guilt by association, favored by Bachmann's hawkish intelligence nemesis Arnie Mohr, who bases it on Issa's known contacts. Untraceable Muslims are automatically treated with suspicion, even when, as in this case, the supposed “evidence” seems not to fit the personality of the accused.

XREF: Connects to broader themes of profiling and presumption of guilt, and how intelligence communities construct suspects from associations rather than evidence.

For those who were brought to trial, the exercise of justice was placed in the hands of secret and unaccountable military tribunals—part of what Judith Butler describes as “a broader tactic to neutralize the rule of law in the name of security.” Their shoddy practices call to mind the way in which the case against Issa—such as it is—has been cobbled together with hearsay and secondhand reports constituting evidence. This “cowboy tradition of vigilante justice” is articulated at the end of the novel by the CIA agent Newton, who tells Bachmann, “Justice has been rendered, man.… Justice from the fucking hip, man. No-crap justice, that kind of justice! Justice with no fucking lawyers around to pervert the course” (338–39, emphasis and ellipses in original).

XREF: Connects to Judith Butler's critique of security rhetoric neutralizing rule of law; also parallels ongoing debates about rendition and military tribunals.

Some of the most striking parts of the novel are where Le Carré reveals how the narratives relied on by the security services are often incomplete, incorrect, hypothesized—constructed to answer the needs of neatness and political policy. The novel is made up of stories—and of stories within stories—reflecting the spy's trade but also acting to expose the potential abuse of language in the interests of power. In this context, the "truth" comes to be what the important people are predisposed to believe.

XREF: Connects to Foucault's concept of power shaping discourse and to broader critiques of official narratives in espionage literature.

In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly in 1999, Secretary-General Kofi Annan identified a shift in the concept of sovereignty from the national to the individual. As Sungur Sarvan points out, it followed that "where a state violates human rights, the 'international community' has the 'right to intervene,' militarily if need be, in the internal affairs of that state." This definition inaugurated the notion of "cross-border rights," those rights that can be "defended" by an outside force. It was a short step from this notion to the policy of "regime change" pursued by the Bush administration in the first years of the twenty-first century. This sea change in foreign relations was cemented in 2005 by the United Nations' adoption of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, which boldly declares that "sovereignty no longer exclusively protects States from foreign interference" and that states may be seen to forfeit their sovereignty if they fail adequately to protect their populations from human rights violations.

XREF: Connects to debates on humanitarian intervention and Responsibility to Protect doctrine conflicts with state sovereignty norms. QUESTION: Worth examining how domestic sovereignty narratives vs. cross-border intervention evolved after the 2005 R2P doctrine.

Malreddy has objected to these features of the narrative. He sees The Warlord's Son as marked throughout by "aggressive," "frenzied," and "knee-jerk Orientalism" that simply recycles stereotypes in the interests of lurid sensationalism. Fesperman does employ and trade on certain exoticist clichés, especially early on, but his use of them is mitigated by being part of what is actually an insistent questioning of the reliability of his protagonist as focalizer. Malreddy is too quick to conflate character and author and ignores the deliberate distance used to point up Skelly's responses as limited and partial. Indeed, the story comes increasingly to be about the gradual development of Skelly's perspective from Orientalism to a kind of relativism.

XREF: Connects to Said's Orientalism and debates about whether employing stereotypes necessarily reproduces them — here they intentionally mark character blindness.

The uncanny is also, as Hugh Haughton puts it, "a survival from the abandoned culture of our own childhood, bearing the Gothic signature of our own earliest terrors and desires." At one point, while being led by a young local boy through nighttime village streets to meet the chieftain who will lead them into Afghanistan, Skelly finds that a random series of images from his own past spring to mind: a wizened old man looks like a fairytale sorcerer; the clang of a gunsmith's hammer calls to mind the "Elves and Dwarves" of fairytales; his mute guide calls up an unbidden biblical verse—"And the children shall lead them"; and the camp is so eerie that Skelly expects at any moment to see "a headless horseman gallop past" (205–7).

The aim of all this is not so much to indicate a simple intercultural resemblance or to suggest that Afghanistan resembles the United States of 150 years earlier. Rather, it is to reveal how our perceptions of the Other are always fashioned with the cultural tools we have available to us.

XREF: Echoes Said's Orientalism and classic social constructionist accounts of how we perceive the Other.

Richard Flanagan's novel The Unknown Terrorist is concerned with the utility of just such news media frames and also how they are open to manipulation and extension. Their ubiquity and dissemination in a globalized media landscape testify to a practical concern for what certain types of story are worth in a market. In the case of Muslims and terror, this becomes, in effect, a market for Islamophobia. Yet news discourse is only one vehicle for this market; the others include popular-cultural forms such as film, television, and literature; the terrain of social media; the utterances of politicians; and so on.

SEED: Potential essay angle: how market dynamics — not just ideology — drive Islamophobic media frames across film, TV, literature, social media, and political speech.

These limitations have to do with the fact that the characters who experience discrimination and exclusion most directly or toward whom our emotional investment is directed tend not to be Muslim. Setting aside real-world inequalities, these novels tacitly assume that the reader will more readily identify with the quandaries of protagonists who share a known, familiar cultural orientation.

The book insists that human beings are more—and more complex—than the simplified stories that are told about them. Even so, she ends up caught between the stereotypes, forced to play out an end that, it feels, might almost have been prescripted by the screenwriters of the movie her life story will surely become. No longer just a doll, at the end she appears to be an automaton fulfilling programmed instructions from the cultural zeitgeist. There is a sense that by embracing her fate, the Doll, with no way out, has finally turned into the murdering madwoman the press have invented.

In addition to the usual increased capacity to intrude on citizens' lives, potential curbs on freedom and normal legal practices were introduced. As Richard Jackson puts it, constructing the supreme emergency “creates a situation of extreme crisis … where normal politics is suspended and where the usual checks and balances on the exercise of power can be dispensed with”—the idea being to produce a sense of paranoia where the public “feels grateful to the state for relieving an anxiety which was encouraged by officials in the first place.”

XREF: Connects to the manufactured-crisis concept in Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine and surveillance-state arguments.

In this world, everything—love, hate, beauty, and art—is a commodity among other commodities. Frank Moretti’s house dazzles with its taste and opulence, a cornucopia of Etruscan mosaics, Aboriginal art, and works by Constantin Brancusi, Sean Scully, and Joan Miró: “every decoration working towards some greater whole” (128). Even women become commodities as Moretti talks of the other strippers he has employed “as though they were paintings that could be bought and sold” (136).

As part of the Doll’s special act for visiting U.S. marines, she performs in the guise of the “Black Widow”: “she would appear in a long black dress and hijab, then slowly strip to crotchless black knickers and an open cup black bra.… And as she did so Ferdy [the owner of the club], using a data projector, would cover her flesh with swirling Arabic lettering which he claimed to the audience was ‘the Black Widow’s most sacred book,’ the Koran” (41). This seedy display, which in its calligraphic details recalls Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Theo van Gogh’s controversial film Submission (2004), reveals the fetishization of the female Muslim Other as object of military intervention—the performance is accompanied by “explosions, screams and a thudding rhythm” (40)—and as veiled and thus all the more alluring focus of sexual fantasy. Never was racism’s flipside in desire illustrated so starkly as in this show for the club’s paying punters.

Fear is the novel’s most useful commodity. Security gurus and government apparatchiks privately emphasize the value of keeping citizens in fear and thus quiescent. As the Doll remarks to her best friend, Sally Wilder, "People like fear. We all want to be frightened and we all want somebody to tell us how to live.… [I]f you can make up a terrorist you've given people the Devil. They love the Devil. They need the Devil. That's my job. You get me?" (166). In his classic study Folk Devils and Moral Panics, Stanley Cohen shows how collective fears are amplified by the media and made to focus on a symbolic Other (the "folk devil") but at the same time expose important fault lines within society. Flanagan's novel suggests that stoking such fears became a central tactic of governance after 9/11, invoked in support of the expansion of Western military power and state surveillance.

SEED: Could form the basis of an essay on how contemporary governance trades in manufactured enemies and amplified moral panics, extending Stanley Cohen's folk devil framework to the post-9/11 surveillance state.

Long before this, the Doll is already a marginal figure: certainly beyond the limits of respectability as a sex worker, although "providing a service" in the valorized terms of commodity culture. Falsely accused and pursued, she is ejected from society, becomes persona non grata—another homo sacer and victim of the war on terror. However, the success of the ritual casting out is guaranteed only when ordinary citizens can be made to implement it. The unusual thing about The Unknown Terrorist is that it is a white Australian non-Muslim rather than a Muslim who undergoes this process. The Doll is forced to inhabit the space in contemporary demonology occupied by the Muslim, but in the novel as a whole Muslims are almost entirely absent.

The Unknown Terrorist gestures toward the double standard by which Muslim rights and lives are treated as if they have less value than those of non-Muslims. The sadistic Frank Moretti keeps a "Cabinet of Human Comedy" containing historical items commemorating cruelty: a letter by Stalin; a machete from the Rwandan genocide; shoes from an Armenian mass grave. Among his trove is a Dutch pistol from the forces that failed to protect the Muslim Bosniaks of Srebrenica from massacre in 1995. He remarks: " 'The Serbs killed eight thousand civilians left unprotected. And this Beretta … meant to protect all those people, never used.' He was laughing. 'That's something, eh? Three thousand Americans die and it changes history. Eight and a half thousand Muslims die and it's forgotten' " (134). In his own distorted way, Moretti is here calling attention to the disparity in what Judith Butler calls "grievability": the degree to which lives lost can be publically recalled and commemorated. Butler points out the vast discrepancy between the recording and individualization of those lost in the United States on 9/11 and the countless, nameless, faceless others subsequently killed in the war on terror.

DEFINE: Introduces Butler's concept of grievability — the differential capacity of public commemoration across populations.

It might even be possible to consider their prevarications an instance of latent Islamophobia: that unconscious prejudice against the kind of unpredictable personal coordinates the observant Muslim character might display. (Issa in Le Carré’s novel takes us some way in that direction, but his religious conservatism is disarmed by the weight of Western perfidy bearing down on him.) Although we are always aware that somewhere beyond the book covers real people are suffering hardship and death because of neoimperialist policies and the forces they have unleashed, these policies and forces’ imprint in the post-9/11 thriller is secondary to considerations of Western ethics and Western moral scruples. In the end, the liberal thriller seems to have a strange, evasive relationship to confronting Islamophobia, dodging any engagement with the real racial-cultural coordinates of resurgent majoritarian nationalisms. Although scrupulously not claiming to speak on behalf of suffering Muslim victims in the war on terror, the liberal thriller writers I have examined here nonetheless reaffirm a culturalist bias in choosing not to imaginatively enter the space of the real victims of Islamophobia.

DEFINE: Latent Islamophobia is defined as unconscious prejudice against unpredictable personal coordinates of observant Muslim characters — a subtle but operative concept in the passage.

Nadeem Aslam's novel The Wasted Vigil (2008) opens with the image of hundreds of books nailed to the ceiling of a house near the Afghan town of Usha in Kandahar. They have been secured there in the hope that marauding Taliban forces will not find and destroy them. We first see them through the eyes of Lara, a visitor from Russia who has arrived in search of her brother, a soldier missing since the era of the Soviet occupation. We are told, "When enough light began to enter the house, she placed mirrors on the floor to look at the books overhead, though not all of them had been nailed with the titles facing out, and any number of them were in languages she did not possess." This striking description serves to introduce the novel's concern with the fate of human cultural expression in a lawless and violent land; the international, polyglot nature of the library also gestures toward a committed eclecticism redolent of the novel's prevailing cosmopolitan value system.

FICTION: The narrative device of books nailed to a ceiling is a potent image for any story about resistance to censorship or cultural erasure — a physical, almost desperate act of preservation worth exploring.

Whereas writers such as Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, and company arguably take on board the clash-of-civilizations model and write from within its assumptions—explaining or lamenting seemingly irrecoverable difference and taking a stand for so-called Western values—Nadeem Aslam and Kamila Shamsie might more truly be termed world or global writers. Their stories cover different geographical locations, contain an international cast of characters, and critically trace the courses and consequences of economic, political, and military globalization. They contest the notion of a clash of civilizations and oppose overt Islamophobia with a more nuanced sense of the multiple possibilities for Muslim identities in the modern world. … Yet the work of these cosmopolitan writers, moving between East and West yet never entirely at home in either, conveys a sense of estrangement and a sharpened awareness of the scope and continuities of imperial and postimperial power politics. This transnational quality moves us beyond habitual ways of recognizing and containing literature within nationalist compartments—an approach perennially favored by university departments and bookstores.

DEFINE: Distinguishes 'world or global writers' (Aslam, Shamsie) from Western-identified novelists who write within clash-of-civilizations assumptions.

Pakistani domestic and foreign policies have from the start been shaped by a felt need for parity with neighboring India. Specific disagreements with India, such as the dispute about the fate of Kashmir after independence, led Pakistan to search for international relationships that would aid its own security. In the early years after the Second World War, Pakistani anxieties met with the U.S. desire for client states in South and Southeast Asia to combat the regional threat from the Soviet Union. … Thus, Pakistan became an important player in the international anti-Communist alliance of the 1950s and 1960s: a position that—rather ironically for a new nation—set it against that popular anti-imperial sentiment widespread during the period as decolonization and anticolonial nationalist crises in Iraq, Egypt, the Republic of Congo, and Indochina drew popular support across the Third World.

The development of a particular kind of political Islam was further stimulated by Pakistan's increasingly close relationship with Muslim countries in the Middle East: a rapprochement that began in earnest after the oil crisis in 1973, when the oil-producing nations of the region were able to flex their economic muscle on the world stage. The government of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto looked to these countries for economic support, but in the process Saudi influence in Pakistan began to increase, with a resultant hardening of religious attitudes and an ambition among Islamic religious parties to take center stage in politics. Bhutto was unable to control these forces, which resulted in his own deposition and execution at the end of 1970s.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on Saudi petrodollar diplomacy spreading Wahhabism across the Muslim world in the 1970s.

Toor describes how in a bid to curry favor with the Americans Pakistan banned the Communist Party in 1954 and signed the Mutual Defense and Assistance Pact with the United States. To combat left-leaning intellectuals, a Pakistani branch of the Congress for Cultural Freedom was set up with the backing of the CIA as part of that attempted cultural rollback of the Cold War years that resulted elsewhere in the establishment of CIA-funded magazines such as Encounter and the Partisan Review.

XREF: Connects to the broader CIA cultural Cold War operations (Encounter, Partisan Review, Congress for Cultural Freedom) that run throughout Toor's book.

What does seem potentially useful is the idea of reading as proactive in situating itself—as well as the cultural commodities it examines—within networks of power. Reading is thus no longer a mode of passive reception or of reassembling known elements within an ideology that remains the unacknowledged norm. It becomes instead a mode of engaging with difference wherein critical practice transforms not only its object but itself, too.

However, I would argue that the use of insistent negatives in the passage also says something about Casa's status as a figure that we are, in the end, not being invited to identify with. Indeed, it is here, in the black-and-white framing of motivation and thus in the manipulation of our sympathy for liberal ends, that some of the ambivalences in Aslam's worlding begin to appear. There is a strong investment here in the old humanist idea that exposure to literature and being widely read make one a better, more-rounded person. Marcus, Lara, and David—all hailing from the non-Muslim world—are to varying degrees perspicacious and well read: able to swap literary quotations and trade historical anecdotes in vast quantities. Casa, in contrast, is a creature finally to be pitied for his untutored lack of self-awareness.

To put one's faith in religious or nationalist dogma requires a kind of moral blindness to human suffering—something that David painfully learns when his youthful U.S.-centered political certainties crumble in the face of the conflicting demands of love. His early position is replicated in the new generation by James Palantine, son of an erstwhile friend for whom ideology outweighs the personal: he berates David for not being able to bury his personal feelings in the interests of America's strategic priorities (387). Palantine acts as Casa's opposite number in terms of uncompromising zeal. He comes to personify the U.S.-led war on terror, investing fully in the American nation and its symbols and seeing himself as defending it against a rampaging monolithic Islam with designs on the homeland: "Al Qaeda hiding in the mouth of the Golden Eagle.… They want to do to the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore what they did to the Buddhas of Bamiyan" (380–81, ellipses in original). Later on, when Palantine has captured Casa and is torturing him for information, he tells an appalled David, "It's nothing personal against this man.… It's not between him and me. It's between them and us" (411). His view of the Islamic enemy demands a dehumanization that, in his willingness to employ "enhanced interrogation techniques," reflects his own limited conceptions of what is human and inhuman.

For David, the quest to discover what happened to his former lover, Zameen, causes a revision of his previous temporizing outlook. As a young man in 1979, he found himself caught up in a mob attack on the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad inspired by the recent revolution in Iran, an event that provided him with his first lesson in the inextricable link between the political and the personal. Having waited many hours for relief in the besieged embassy, David was later stunned to learn that President Carter thanked the new Pakistani dictator, General Zia, for his swift response. Subsequently, as a dutiful intelligence officer, "David himself was present on a number of occasions where the man [Zia] was extravagantly celebrated and flattered, his own voice adding to the dishonest chorus" (108). Of course, Zia had just deposed and executed the elected prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and was about to commence his Islamization program in Pakistan with the full connivance of the United States, which was grateful for this reliable ally in the fight against a Soviet Union that by the end of the year would demonstrate its own imperialist intentions by invading neighboring Afghanistan.

XREF: Connects to broader themes in Tariq Ali's fiction about the entanglement of geopolitics, U.S. foreign policy, and individual moral development in South Asia.

Thus are individuals caught up in the unceasing machinations of warring empires. The personal/political nexus results in tragedy for David when he finally discovers the fate of Zameen, shot by a local warlord, Gul Rasool, with the backing of the CIA, which thought she might be an enemy agent. In the world of espionage, where principles come a distant second to expendability and deniability, Zameen's fate feels as arbitrary as the alliances that have led to it. We learn that Gul Rasool has ended up a valuable U.S. ally in the war on terror in Afghanistan simply because he made himself available to U.S. troops when they arrived—with large cash incentives—in the invasion of 2001 and at the same time made sure that a rival warlord was temporarily incapacitated and therefore ended up on the "other side."

The book ends with Marcus accompanying the Buddha's head on an American military helicopter flight to the National Museum in Kabul, away from the turmoil of Usha, with its battling tribes and warlords. Madeline Clements has described how this ending can be read as a reaffirmation that Western forces and imperial archival institutions are in the end the only ones to be trusted with custodianship of the relics of Afghan antiquity. Certainly, taking the Buddha to an area of comparative safety controlled by the United States and its allies underlines the nagging suspicion that only the West truly understands the importance of cultural heritage. It can be seen as, in James Clifford's terms, an act of "ethnographic salvage," rescuing peripheral cultures from the threat of "dissipation, contingency and loss" if left in situ. However, it is possible to argue that rather than simply endorsing this measure, the novel in its closing pages is, in fact, pointing out the further consequences of imperialism: revealing those ongoing local, national, and international compromises—the desire to shepherd the past as well as dictate the future—that are the reality of dominance in the global context. As such, Aslam's novel could be read as responding to Amitava Kumar's call for attention to be paid to "how literature … reveals local or national [or, indeed, international] realities of dominance, suppression, oppression and exploitation in a global context."

XREF: Echoes James Clifford's concept of ethnographic salvage and critiques of Western museums' custodianship claims — connects to postcolonial theory by Clifford, Spivak, and Said. QUESTION: Does the Buddha's removal to Kabul count as salvage or theft? The interpretive tension between 'rescue' and 'dominance' is flagged but unresolved.

Burnt Shadows is, like The Wasted Vigil, constructed as a blend of omniscient narration and polyphony. … Indeed, the novel has a particular interest in time, something indicated in the opening pages, where a fragment of prologue offers us a proleptic snapshot of the novel's end, with a shackled Raza awaiting his inevitable transfer to Guantánamo Bay. This foreshadowing continues with the first words of the novel proper: "Later, the one who survives will remember that day as grey." These words immediately throw us into the future beyond an as yet unnamed tragedy. … This link is not stated for us. Rather, the temporal resonance—like others, such as that between Japanese wartime mistrust of Europeans and post-9/11 Islamophobia—is left for the reader to pick up on.

This approach is of a piece with the book's concern for communication beyond the level contaminated by considerations of status and nation. When Raza is suspected of participating in Harry's assassination and goes on the run from his American pursuers in Afghanistan, he glimpses, while hiding under a pile of sacks on the back of a truck, a group of colorful nomad women making their way across the desert. We learn that "just that glimpse moved Raza into a profound melancholy. No, not melancholy. It was uljhan he was feeling. His emotions were in Urdu now, melancholy and quiet abutting each other like the two syllables of a single word" (332). … Spivak claims that translation is always a watering down of difference, a way of continuing to privilege the European languages into which most translations are rendered. And, of course, translating invariably carries with it shortcomings. Nuanced concepts cannot be fully translated, where meaning has to be felt in between the words, so to speak—as when Raza and his mother invoke the incomparable Japanese aesthetic idea of the value of imperfection and transience, "wabi-sabi" (200).

DEFINE: Explains uljhan as a word whose bilingual resonance abuts melancholy and quiet, and wabi-sabi as untranslatable aesthetic imperfection. XREF: Connects to Spivak's translation-as-watering-down argument, echoing reader's interest in postcolonial literary theory.

Just as Burnt Shadows is alert to those fragile human connections so easily shattered by the raucous insistence of group and national affiliations, so, too, it represents the confluence of economic and military globalization in its depiction of the operations of the private contractor Arkwright and Glenn. Harry and Raza end up working for this company, which runs a camp in Afghanistan serving U.S. military needs.

DEFINE: Arkwright and Glenn exemplifies the private military contractor as the meeting point of economic and military globalization.

Even though Hiroko experiences the same sympathy and desire to reach out to the bereaved, her sense of loss is tempered by the personal recollection of a previous experience of unimaginable brutality—inflicted of course by the United States—that prevents her from accepting the seductive myths of U.S. innocence and exceptionalism circulating at this time.

The term global in my usage suggests that these novels describe subjects and situations that are the result of the logic of globalization, at the same time thereby criticizing, exposing, and awakening in the reader a new awareness of the costs of that process. Inasmuch as the contemporary novel itself takes its place in a globalized market for ideas, the addition of an element of distancing or defamiliarization—worlding, in Kadir's terms—at least allows conventional reactions and expectations to be bracketed and exposed to scrutiny. As we have seen, writing a "world novel" is not a smooth process, and there is always the possibility that to explore the outcomes of global power through one of its major cultural vehicles is to risk reproducing some of its foundational assumptions about art, life, and the relationship between them.

DEFINE: Defines what the author means by 'global' novels: works that both reflect globalization's logic and critically defamiliarize it.

As allusive yet broadly realist writers, even with their international, intercultural influences, Aslam and Shamsie seem to stand within this tradition. The ubiquity of the liberal view is reflected in the fact that, in the end, Aslam's attempts to render the inner life of an Islamist militant hardly differ, in their awkward lacunae, from Updike's labored, hamstrung efforts. Shamsie's characters are more nuanced, but the narrative arc on which they are perched still describes a battle between models of cosmopolitanism and nationalism.

XREF: Connects to the broader critical debate about whether postcolonial writing can escape Western liberal narrative conventions, echoing arguments from criticism on cosmopolitanism and literary form. QUESTION: What would a genuinely non-liberal rendering of an Islamist militant's inner life look like in fiction? This invites further thinking about alternatives to the cosmopolitan/nationalist binary.

Nonetheless, we will see that both The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Minaret face similar challenges in terms of negotiating their place in what we might call a literary “market for the Muslim.” This global market is both a commercial one, in the case of Hamid’s text, and, for Aboulela’s novel, a critical market for interpreting the Muslim writer that maps onto prevailing orthodoxies about how secular modernity is the defining feature of a West that has evolved beyond the irrational consolations of religion. We need to think about how these categories operate, how they are circulated in a world eager for answers to “the Muslim problem,” and—most crucially—what they leave out.

SEED: This is a strong angle for a critical essay on how Western literary markets constrain what Muslim writers can produce and how they are read — the 'market for the Muslim' concept could anchor a piece. XREF: Connects to Hamid's 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' and Aboulela's 'Minaret', and to broader postcolonial criticism on how the West consumes literature from the periphery.

My interest is in exploring the extent to which these two texts acknowledge a need to find a form that not only conveys experience but also inscribes an awareness of how those experiences can be read (and misread) as a result of prevailing anthropological views of what a “Muslim text” can and should do. From there, we can ask whether the most effective imaginative modes of combating Islamophobia are to be found in a head-on engagement that seeks to reassert the value of a life oriented around Islamic subjectivity, or whether a more oblique approach that plays with readerly expectations and hence prejudices can more effectively destabilize norms of thinking. The distinction at first sight appears to be between a novel that challenges established ways of seeing and one that attempts to convey the immediate personal experience of life and faith from an Islamic perspective.

QUESTION: Which approach — direct or oblique — proves more effective at destabilizing reader prejudice? The author poses this as an open question worth pursuing.

However, because there is no space outside this market for the modern author who seeks an international readership, the text is able only to point to its circumscribed position, not to transcend it. The result is what Geoffrey Nash has called The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s “purposive ambiguity”: “operating entirely within a western discourse it mounts a guarded resistance on behalf of the precariously placed stranger while still making overtures of reason to an audience he [Hamid] perhaps wishes to placate.”

XREF: Connects to postcolonial theory conversations about the constraints of writing for Western audiences while representing the subaltern or 'stranger'.

I have argued elsewhere that this novel answers Richard Gray’s call for a “deterritorialization” of post-9/11 American literature: an idea that can be applied more broadly to all English-language fiction attempting to deal with the fallout from the atrocity. Faced with what he sees as the parochialism and timidity of war-on-terror novels, Gray suggests that writers need to expand and defamiliarize their imaginative territory, to find a space between or at least from which to try to do justice to conflicting political interests and positions. Instead of simple empathy, the novel form needs to explore the contradictions that animate debates in the world today, making the text a site of struggle for these different versions. This might mean trying to come at things aslant—from an oblique angle, so to speak. And it may well mean a need for new or more experimental types of narrative structure.

DEFINE: Defines Gray's concept of 'deterritorialization' — expanding and defamiliarizing imaginative territory to address conflicting political positions in post-9/11 fiction.

Moreover, the dramatic monologue enables us to see the world from Changez’s point of view, but what it prevents us from doing at all is finding out for sure about his American interlocutor. Who is he? Is he, as Changez seems to imply, an American agent sent to kill him? Or is he just a passing tourist who has chanced upon this restaurant in Lahore’s Old Anarkali district? We do not know. We are never told. And that is the point of the form. Its one-sidedness actually performs that archetypal novelistic trick of taking us inside the head of the character, but, in so doing, it refuses us the normalizing consolation of a dialogue. As a result, we find ourselves almost forced to respond in ways dictated by Changez; we become the uninstructed addressee, with all the agendas and prejudices our storyteller slyly suggests. Although a liberal Western reader may baulk at being asked to identify himself or herself with someone who may well be a cold-blooded CIA assassin, the novel suggests a continuum of assumptions working to normalize the Othering of Muslims, which include liberal complacency as surely as neoconservative antipathy.

Changez’s boss, Jim, explains his role in terms that suture together evolution and economics to imply the inevitability of globalization. When Changez becomes deflated by local resistance to his attempts to cut the “fat” off an ailing New Jersey cable operator—a process that will result in outsourcing, consolidation, and “headcount reduction”—Jim consoles him with a personal history of neoliberal economic realities: “The economy is an animal.… It evolves. First it needed muscle. Now all the blood it could spare was rushing to its brain. That’s where I wanted to be. In finance. In the coordination business. And that’s where you are. You’re blood brought from some part of the body that the species doesn’t need anymore. The tailbone. Like me. We came from places that were wasting away” (97, emphasis in original).

XREF: This biological-evolution metaphor for economics parallels other social Darwinist framings of globalization in migration and labor literature.

Producing articles with titles such as “Pakistan Must Not Be Abandoned” (Guardian, October 15, 2001); “Pakistan’s Silent Majority Is Not to Be Feared” (New York Times, March 27, 2007); and “Why Do They Hate Us?” (Washington Post, July 22, 2007), Hamid is a much sought contributor to contemporary debates, whose immersion in the cultures of both East and West—he was part educated and employed for many years in the United States and Britain—give him a perceived authority.

Yet I would suggest that Hamid’s articles, like The Reluctant Fundamentalist, can be read as part of what Graham Huggan has called “staged marginality”—not staged in the sense of being fake but performatively “simulating the conditions in which the dominant (in this case white Anglo-Saxon) culture perceives … marginalised people.” The reception of Hamid’s work, as much as anything intrinsic to it, gives it something of the quality of those minor literatures identified in the postcolonial context by David Lloyd and Abdul JanMohamed, drawing on original definitions by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Among the salient features of this form of writing, produced by a minority in the language of the majority culture of which he or she is also a part, are “the questioning or destruction of the concepts of identity and identification, the rejection of representations of developing autonomy and authenticity[,] … and accordingly a profound suspicion of narratives of reconciliation and unification.”

DEFINE: Defines 'staged marginality' and 'minor literatures' from Deleuze/Guattari via Lloyd and JanMohamed.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist inscribes these features in the experiences of Changez, whose overall story punctures the notion of an easily identifiable “us and them” and whose sense of identity fluctuates throughout the novel. From early endeavors to submerge his “Third World” sensibility and identify completely with the sleek world of global capitalism, Changez performs a volte face—his eyes having been opened by the Chilean publisher Juan Bautista—and ends up seemingly ensconced in a Pakistani identity that defines itself explicitly against America and its imperial policies around the globe. However, the first half of the book works directly against any such thing as an essential identity as this chameleon takes on the hue of his environment. As his perspective changes, he comes to observe that “my Pakistaniness was invisible, cloaked by my suit, my expense account, and—most of all—by my companions” (71). Yet even this observation may not indicate a belated discovery of “true” identity. Later, thinking back on his failed romance with Erica, during which he acted out the part of her dead boyfriend during sex, he concedes: “I lacked a stable core.… Probably this was why I had been willing to try to take on the persona of Chris, because my own identity was so fragile” (148, emphasis in original). Finally, in a semisurreal scene in which he fantasizes the presence of his now long lost love with him on the streets in Lahore, he confesses to being “transported”—a word conjuring the idea of a dream as much as any geographical movement: “Such journeys have convinced me that it is not always possible to restore one’s boundaries after they have been blurred and made permeable by a relationship: try as we might, we cannot reconstitute ourselves as the autonomous beings we previously imagined ourselves to be. Something of us is now outside, and something of the outside is now within us” (173–74).

The fluidity of identity implied here means that Changez’s marginality is always to some extent recuperable for a Western audience who might have been alienated by actual confessions of terrorist activity or a sudden discovery of religious conviction. The fact that Changez ends up the figurehead for a broad coalition standing up against American meddling in South Asia and not a foaming Islamist militant allows for his critique to find its target audience—primarily liberal Westerners who are more likely to accept criticism that comes from within a narrative of secular nationalism. This is not to suggest that Hamid is being deliberately duplicitous or consciously tactical. Rather, being such a figurehead is an approved function of the Third World cultural representative, one whose sanctioned role is to speak from a place nominally “outside” hegemonic discourses and to present the hegemon with uncomfortable truths about itself.

DEFINE: Defines the 'approved function' of the Third World cultural representative who speaks from a nominally outside position.

Hamid is, then, in some respects critiquing the globalizing of media and culture that his own novel is a part of. Yet he also attempts to mitigate the functionalist view through a renewed attention to story making. The Reluctant Fundamentalist in fact performs the manipulation of literature through globalization via its consideration of authorship and the literary. This manipulation can first be seen in the fate of the novel’s creative writer, Erica. We could say that Erica represents the unsuccessful writer, the one who fails to reconcile herself to contemporary market realities. Her excitement at acquiring a literary agent is not at first tempered by his warning that the novella—her preferred form—is “a platypus of a beast” and notoriously difficult to market (87). Yet as her psychological problems mount, she can no longer find refuge in writing and ignores her agent’s calls: “I used to turn to it, my writing, when I needed to get something out that was stuck inside. But I can’t get it out now. It pulls me in, you know? I dwell on it instead of writing it” (111–12).

DEFINE: Erica functions as a character type: the unsuccessful writer crushed by psychological burden and indifferent to commercial demands, contrasting with the novel's own negotiation of globalized literary markets.

Brouillette has noted how literary texts by postcolonial writers often sit alongside the paratexts of authorial marketing, such as press interviews and media features (and in Hamid’s case journalistic forays) in a process of “authorial branding.” Taken together, these texts and paratexts emphasize commodification, whereas “the figure of the author becomes … a way of concealing mass production in individualism.” The emphasis on the supposedly authentic postcolonial writer is a response to perceived niche markets, and the public persona of the writer is, to that extent, a sign of the historical “convergence between the market position of postcolonial literatures and the market function of signatured authorship.” Far from writers being passive in this process, we can detect what Brouillette calls a “trope of self-authorization through awareness of the political uses or appropriations of one’s works.”

DEFINE: Clarifies Brouillette's concept of 'authorial branding' — the process by which a writer's public persona and paratexts (interviews, media features) emphasize commodification while concealing mass production in a figure of individual authorship.

I would argue that this insight encapsulates The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s concerns and the mode of their inscription: what the story tells, to whom, and how it is told. In other words, the novel enacts a “return of the author” as what Gupta calls an “explanatory construct, as a subject in whom intellectual property is vested, as an implicit biographical subject or historical reference point.” The novel can be seen to have a double author: Mohsin Hamid the historical personage—author and authority on Pakistan—and Changez the knowing, manipulative author of the narrative we are given to read.

DEFINE: Introduces Gupta's concept of "return of the author" as an explanatory construct, biographical subject, and historical reference point applied to the novel's dual authorship.

Even so, to attribute the responsibility for contemporary flashpoints—Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Iraq—to “the advancement of a small coterie’s concept of American interests” (178) is surely too short-sighted for the supposedly savvy political animal Changez has become by the end of the book. For one thing, it implies that these problems are all the fault of the George W. Bush administration and the neoconservatives who have hijacked the White House. Presumably, then, the solution is simply to remove this clique, and a more just world will result. Not only does this diagnosis militate against the attempt to provide a historical sense of injustice, but it is also willfully blind to the fact that such economic and political international meddling has been structural, intrinsic to U.S. domestic and international policies since at least the 1950s and the rise of Dwight Eisenhower’s famous military-industrial complex.

In the Western tradition, the bildungsroman has usually been defined in relation to active self-realization through material or social integration and reward or, conversely, through rejection of such goals. The development of the self is commensurate with a “coming in” to the bosom of society in the classic realist novel. Conversely, within literary modernism these comforts may ultimately be rejected, but they are rejected by the heroic will of agents who prefer isolation or even death to social conformity. In the romance, the main narrative energies are directed toward emotional and erotic fulfillment. A novel such as Minaret that deliberately rejects both models, without any compensatory material advancement or sense of secular gender solidarity, seems to transgress some of the basic “rules” of literature as it is understood to have developed.

DEFINE: Clarifies how the bildungsroman and romance have conventionally been defined in Western literature.

In other words, Minaret appears to reveal the difficulty of attempting to move the secular individualist form of the novel back to its spiritual roots, to fill an art form etched by three hundred years of secular individualism with a sense of God as a real presence. The difficulty of this task is reflected in the novel’s interpretative crises and challenges and in the collision between its spiritual agenda and the banality of its chosen form.

QUESTION: What interpretive crises specifically expose the form's secular inertia? Curious whether the collision is inherent to the novel genre or specific to this work.

However, this different way of reckoning morality is an essential component of Minaret’s move away from established notions of a good or bad, moral or immoral life. As we shall see, good conduct stems from the performance of appropriate faith, not from balanced judgment exercised in relation to reason and ethics.

DEFINE: Defines a non-standard reckoning of morality where goodness follows from performing appropriate faith rather than balanced ethical reasoning.

All of her decisions tend toward the consolidation or preservation of community and family rather than toward the individual fulfillment expected of a novelistic protagonist. Losing her own family makes her acutely aware of the value of kinship support networks, and she gives up Tamer in part to stop him from "sinning" against his mother through disobedience and with the aim of keeping his family together.

XREF: Connects to the novelistic-protagonist tradition from classic literary criticism, where protagonists typically pursue individual desires against social constraints.

This is a crucial distinction and one remarked upon in Saba Mahmood's analysis of Egyptian Muslim women when she notes the Western critical tendency to misread Islamist movements as "a recoding of [Arab] nationalist sentiment in religious idioms." Both Mahmood and Aboulela reject this as an inaccurate understanding of the role of Islam as an all-encompassing internationalist solidarity; in Minaret, Najwa remarks on the many nations represented in the weekly Quran classes she attends at her local mosque. In pitting the religious against the national and the personal against the political, the novel clearly seeks to endorse the former in each case.

XREF: Connects Saba Mahmood's critique of Western misreading of Islamist movements to Aboulela's novel, building a shared corrective lens.

In this view, the pious subject comes into being through bodily acts such as veiling, avoiding eye contact with men, and scrupulously performing prescribed domestic duties. Such things "are the critical markers of piety, as well as the ineluctable means by which one trains oneself to be pious."

This distinction also has implications for the idea of freedom, which in the Islamic tradition Mahmood is invoking is realized by submission to forms of religious authority rather than by struggle against restraining traditions that must be overcome, as in the more familiar Enlightenment idea. Autonomy, figured as individual choice and free will, is seen as part of the liberal tradition particularly dear to Western feminists, who frequently fail to see the choice of Islamic piety among women as genuine or legitimate. Mahmood points out that "illiberal" choices can be autonomous, too—not simply imposed by oppressive patriarchy.

XREF: Challenges the Western Enlightenment framing of autonomy as individual choice; connects to critiques of liberal feminism discussed elsewhere in the reading. QUESTION: What would genuinely autonomous deference to religious authority look like in practice versus mere compliance under coercion?

According to Mahmood, the faithful subject is produced through the performance of pious behavior and ritual rather than such behavior and ritual symbolizing an inward state of faith. … Ritualized behavior constitutes the pious self. It does not symbolize it. This is part of Mahmood's modification of Judith Butler's notion of performativity, wherein resistance can be articulated by exaggerated or parodic performance of, for instance, gender norms. For Mahmood's mosque women, performance is not about subverting norms but about upholding them. Moreover, language-based approaches such as semiotics miss the point for Mahmood because performance is intrinsic to the creation of identity, not an expression of it.

DEFINE: Clarifies Mahmood's reworking of Butler's performativity: performance creates the subject rather than expressing a pre-existing inward state. Distinguishes faithful performance (upholding norms) from Butler's parodic subversion. XREF: Connects to Butler's gender performativity and to broader poststructuralist debates about identity construction versus expression in anthropology of religion.

If all novels tend to be about personal transformation in some form or another, in Minaret the agent of transformation is different: good religious observance and submission rather than weathering life's vicissitudes and winning through to a new place in the world.

The emphasis on performance, technique, and ritual here is not simply about liturgical consolation or the concentration required to master Quranic Arabic. Rather, it draws our attention to a way of engaging with textual material quite different from protocols of reading that are normally hermeneutic and concerned with extracting meaning.

I wish to argue that this distinction is sometimes overstated and can be misleading. As Asad observes, Islamophobic discourse insists that the Quran forces a literalist interpretation—and therefore a prescribed set of actions—on its adherents, whereas the Bible allows for and has thus been repeatedly subject to critical interpretation.

XREF: Connects to broader critiques of simplistic East-West dichotomies in religious studies and postcolonial scholarship on how Islamophobia shapes the framing of scripture interpretation.

However, the postsecularists leave this problematic unresolved, merely pointing to the conflict between worldviews. In this understanding, literature itself becomes part of the problem, effectively a tool in the clash of civilizations.

Asad here overlooks a century or more of Marxist criticism, to say nothing of other political schools such as feminism, race studies, and queer theory, which continue to challenge discourses of power in the interpretations they offer. Techniques of reading against the grain, along with that relative autonomy of literary texts that I have been keen to foreground in this study, reveal this argument as cripplingly limited.

XREF: Connects to broader literary criticism traditions — Marxist, feminist, race, queer theory — that practice resistant reading strategies.

Aboulela employs a flat, direct narrative style, at once attuned to the generally mundane nature of existence. However, she is at the same time trying to persuade us of the reality of Najwa's spiritual awakening and to get us to accept her understanding of providential intervention.

The challenge of producing a religious novel may appear, on the face of it, to be simply a matter of writing sympathetically about religious characters and perspectives. However, in the Western (and specifically English) novelistic and critical tradition—within which postcolonialism occupies an important but contested space—one must contend with what is often taken to be the three-hundred-year-old drift away from spirituality and faith toward a materialist working out of narrative plot and human choices. … God does not intervene directly, and where the guiding hand of Providence is seen, it tends to be equally explicable in terms of coincidence or, in other cases, heavy-handed omniscient meddling by the author.

Drawing on Giambattista Vico and William Blake, Frye recognizes that literary structures develop from ancient poetic and mythological archetypes and share some of their formal preoccupations and qualities. In particular, he identifies the Bible as the source of the mythological framework for Western literature. … However, his general points about mythological structures as well as some of the formal features he identifies serve to open a different way of looking at Minaret, one that acknowledges continuities among Christian, Islamic, and secular narrative paradigms.

XREF: Connects to Northrop Frye's archetypal criticism and comparative sacred-narrative frameworks that could bridge Christian and Islamic literary traditions.

The controversial ending, where Najwa accepts a payment from Tamer's mother to give him up, may prove disquieting for readers steeped in the tradition of secular romance with its normative expectations. The presence of monetary exchange—in effect a bribe—in parting the two lovers stands in striking contravention of what would ordinarily be considered a satisfactory romance resolution. … That it jars as a denouement is testimony to a kind of generic idealism in the response to romance fiction, where a certain emplotment and narrative trajectory are expected automatically to result in a particular kind of outcome.

XREF: Connects to reader-response theory and generic conventions in popular fiction studies.

By contrast, Minaret's conclusion is communalist in that Najwa chooses to valorize one particular group—the Islamicly devout and observant—against a distinct other group—the profane and the unbelievers—rather than to recycle humanism's usual accommodation with a bigger imaginative universe populated by those who are broadly sympathetic to an inclusive set of moral abstractions. To that extent, the novel feels dogmatic, not, as is the case in most literary fiction, pragmatic.

Although we can say that both Christian and Enlightenment traditions feed modern liberalism, they are faced today by societies in the West that are extremely diverse, containing a number of histories and traditions that make a claim on identity and representation. If the Enlightenment paradigm is often the stick used to beat the "unenlightened" Muslim subjects of Western multicultural states, then a stronger sense of a shared narrative lineage—including but going beyond the recognition that many biblical and Quranic stories have the same Abrahamic roots—becomes necessary.

XREF: Connects to debates about multicultural liberalism, postcolonial critique of Enlightenment universalism, and interfaith dialogue rooted in Abrahamic traditions.

Nevertheless, their insistence on essential cultural differences and authenticity may, in the final analysis, contribute to the frame wherein Western and Islamic cultures are seen on an inevitable collision course.

The very nature of its transparent realist form means the text is always to some extent caught by prevailing modes of reading. Although expectations of genre may be destabilized, prevailing prejudices are not.

DEFINE: Clarifies how transparent realist form constrains a text's subversive potential.

It is a somewhat curious truism that the novel, that preeminent vehicle for the dissection of individual human experience, should, when it comes to texts by Muslim writers, be suddenly seen to take on the qualities of a collectively representative document.

XREF: Parallels broader critical patterns where works by marginalized authors are read as ethnographic documents rather than individual artistic expressions.

I would contend that the fixation with Islam offered by Islamophobia provides a useful cover, a means of evading the numerous specific local, regional, and global issues that cause diverse and otherwise antagonistic solidarities to emerge under the rallying banner of Islam. Thus, although Islamophobia fetishizes Islam as the cause and explanation of violence, the phenomenon of anti-Muslim prejudice serves a useful purpose for Islamophobes in screening out the tortuous results of decades of geopolitical meddling by the West across large swathes of the world where Muslims are in the majority.

Islamophobia seeps in through the cracks of daily life, through hints and rumors, newsfeeds and tweets, in journalists' articles and politicians' utterances. Because such statements have become more overt in their hostility to Islam in the past twenty or so years, they provide the background noise to much of contemporary life. Behind them lie the real injustices, whether the steady stream of anti-Muslim violent rhetoric and actions in Britain, the United States, and Europe or the running sores of Kashmir and Israel/Palestine in world affairs.

XREF: Connects to broader discussions of how prejudice operates through microaggressions and institutional discourse rather than overt acts alone.

It is not enough to rely on the inherent liberality of novel writers and readers or on the automatic response of so-called political correctness. It is necessary to dig down, recognize, and historicize the assumptions and categories that color our reception of novels by and about Muslims and to acknowledge how they can be a part of the creation and fetishization of difference.

DEFINE: Introduces the concept of 'historicizing assumptions' — recognizing that reader categories and biases are historically constructed, not neutral or natural, and must be examined rather than assumed automatic.

Hamid Dabashi notes how what he calls “interested knowledge” is now produced away from academia by bodies such as think tanks. Information is tailored to the demands of those who commission it, resulting in a sort of privatization of knowledge leading to a short-term, disposable product: “fast-knowledge produced on the model of fast food.” Add to this the power of the Internet, where any theory, no matter how extreme, can take root and find an audience, and you have all the conditions for that kind of “post-truth” politics recently identified as marking contemporary democracy: a hodge-podge of rumor, innuendo, and personal grouse with which unscrupulous politicians can build a support base. If there is no longer even the pretence of objectivity in knowledge production—and if experts are scorned and marginalized—then the field lies open to demagoguery, where the most successful exponent of politics will be the one who can cater to the most prejudices.

XREF: Connects to debates on post-truth politics, knowledge privatization, and the decline of expert authority in democratic discourse.

In her account of the decisive influence of Protestant aesthetics in preparing the ground for Islamophobia, Jo Carruthers concludes: “because it is a specific construction of Englishness (that itself engenders Islamophobia) that has been passed on, the expulsion of Islamophobic sentiments is dependent upon an interrogation of Englishness.” My concluding point is similar: we will not properly begin to understand the coordinates of Islamophobia until we have critically considered those frameworks—political, cultural, and aesthetic—through which the sense of “Western-ness” is constructed.

XREF: Connects to postcolonial theory and critical whiteness studies frameworks on how identity categories are constructed.

This is not the same as saying that all writers of Muslim background everywhere produce texts that reinforce or are delimited by this frame. Clearly, Muslim writers choose topics and forms as varied as their own experiences. Here, however, I describe the dominant current mode of understanding texts that address or emerge from the Muslim world and find an audience outside it.

DEFINE: Clarifies the scope of the analytical frame being described — it is the dominant interpretive mode, not a universal feature of all Muslim writers' work.

Gauthier notes how Baxter's awestruck response to “Dover Beach” means that his “ 'difference' is erased and he proves himself open to conversion; he shifts from being a troubling and unpredictable other to a civilizable entity”

XREF: This connects to postcolonial theory on how canonical Western literature functioned as a tool of assimilation and cultural domination. FICTION: A character whose appreciation of high culture is read as submission to the governing power could dramatize this dynamic in a story.

Berman's book was warmly received, especially among liberals, who needed their sinews stiffened for the coming struggle. One can also see why Terror and Liberalism found such an enthusiastic audience among journalists and commentators: with its sweeping generalizations compellingly stitched together to form a continuous tapestry of two hundred years of history, it is an impatient person's idea of a good history book, offering a key to all modern mythologies and explaining how we have arrived at this point. Unfortunately, the book is instead a simple, tub-thumping polemic on behalf of that humanitarian imperialism that was popular for a few years at the start of the twenty-first century.

Anna Hartnell makes the salient point that “the attitude with which Jack Levy looks at the town of New Prospect is one of distaste, which contrasts sharply with that of Henry Perowne as he surveys his beloved London from his Charlotte Street bedroom window in McEwan's Saturday” (“Violence and the Faithful,” 486). The difference is, crucially, one of class: Perowne's privileged position is reflected in his heightened ability to survey the city; Levy and his wife are down among the flotsam and jetsam of urban life.

XREF: Links McEwan's Saturday with the novel featuring Jack Levy, drawing a class-based comparison of narrative perspective.

In truth, this is a three-way interaction because Ramadan is reading Albert Camus's argument in The Rebel as a way to explain the centrality of doubt and rebellion to Western thinking and their absence, for Ramadan, in the Islamic tradition.

Rehana Ahmed has noted how this debate was throughout marked by fault lines of class, race, and religion as the culturally privileged author, Monica Ali, and her reviewers sought to invoke individual imaginative freedom against the collective outrage of those taken to be the book's subjects. She points out that “an absolute advocacy of individual rights obscures the social hierarchies which give some individuals more access to those rights than others[,] … [while the protestors' concerns were] in part rooted in their vulnerability as members of a minority racialised group with a history of poverty and exclusion.” She also makes the important observation that the difference between the Rushdie and Brick Lane controversies lies in the fact that the former was grounded in the assertion of a group religious identity, whereas the latter was concerned with local and cultural disrespect

XREF: Connects to broader postcolonial and critical race theory debates about liberal individualism versus collective identity.

However, The Black Album shows the most tolerance to Riaz's group—and invites the most readerly identification—when the group takes a stand to protect a local Bengali family threatened by racists, patrolling their estate and setting up camp in their cramped flat. Here, they are shown inheriting the kind of vigilante role once performed by those old-style antiracists celebrated by Kenan Malik, whose rhetoric was matched by action in defense of communities. This role reasserts the importance of race and racism even as the main thrust of the narrative records the end of recognizable class-based politics and its supercession by cultural identity claims.

XREF: Connects Kenan Malik's celebration of old-style antiracist action to the vigilante role in The Black Album, contrasting with cultural-identity politics.

As Ranasinha puts it, Kureishi's work " does not present an undiscriminating picture of the dominant majority. However, he uncritically reflects and embodies rather than questions its predominant fears, prejudices and perceptions of devout British Muslims as 'fundamentalists,' constructed as particularly threatening to the West"

QUESTION: This critique of Kureishi's work — that he reflects rather than interrogates Islamophobic stereotypes — challenges common perceptions of him as a progressive multicultural writer.

Geoffrey Nash says of writers such as Rushdie, Kureishi, and Ali that while their sympathies "may be with the individual migrant (a Shahid in The Black Album or a Nazneen in Brick Lane) these [sympathies] usually do not extend to migrant communities, and their fiction more often than not incorporates two-dimensional versions of Islam and Muslim fundamentalists"

Leonie Sandercock, Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities of the 21st Century (London: Continuum, 2003), 102. This view ties in with the analysis offered by Katherine E. Brown, who has noted an alternative to the securitized Muslim of the war-on-terror years in the validated figure of the Muslim who is normalized via participation in sanctioned economic activities. Citing examples such as James Caan, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and television celebrity on the BBC show Dragon's Den; Emel, the Muslim lifestyle magazine; and the women featured in the Times magazine "Muslim Women Power List" for 2009, Brown argues that the "good Muslim" is the one who can be demonstrated to share the values of entrepreneurialism. Their philanthropy and quality as community role models are commensurate with their embodiment of the lesson that self-help and hard work are more laudable than collective lobbying. Brown describes this combination as "meritocratic materialism," pointing out that the good Muslim, "the "normal Muslim," is the one we can do business with

If Mrs. Islam, the moneylender with whom Nazneen and her husband become embroiled earlier, represents both the "bad," usurious face of business—and, in her name, the censorious and restrictive face of religion—then Nazneen's confrontation with her, during which she accuses the old woman of charging riba, or interest, marks the moment when Nazneen finally shakes off her bondage to community traditions and conservative religious practice. As Stephen Morton has put it, "Nazneen's challenge to Mrs Islam is the condition of possibility for both her economic sovereignty and for Nazneen to emerge as the heroic female individual of the neoliberal bildungsroman"

The American journalist Ron Suskind, recalling a meeting with a senior White House adviser during President George W. Bush's first term, describes a curious turn in the conversation. The aide suggested that journalists such as Suskind are "in what we call the reality-based community," where "people believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." However, the aide was about to disabuse Suskind of any such assumption: "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you study that reality—judiciously, as you will—we will act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do"

QUESTION: This is a profound claim about power and reality — worth exploring how the 'reality-based' vs. 'empire' framing has played out since 2002.

The term taqiya refers to permitted dishonesty about one's beliefs if faced with persecution. The term dhimmitude is a modern neologism implying servility or submission to Islam by non-Muslims and is used polemically by Islamophobes.

DEFINE: Clarifies two loaded terms: taqiya as permitted dissimulation under persecution, and dhimmitude as a modern Islamophobic neologism.

Arin Keeble suggests that The Submission rejects pure, authentic notions of identity and emphasizes internal divisions within characters as a way of undoing the reductive polarization of a clash-of-civilizations viewpoint

Agamben goes on to say: "The relation of exception is the relation of a ban. He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it, but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable"

DEFINE: Defines Agamben's concept of the 'ban' and the relation of exception, where the excluded are not simply outside law but abandoned within its threshold. XREF: Connects to Agamben's broader work on state of exception, homo sacer, and biopolitics — likely relevant to a reader working on political theory, sovereignty, or law.

"It is estimated that 100–150 people have been rendered under the revised program and taken to jails in Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Uzbekistan: all of which have been criticised by the State Department for gross violations of human rights"

DEFINE: This documents 'extraordinary rendition' — the practice of transferring detainees to third countries specifically to evade legal protections.

Richard Jackson describes how states deliberately construct extreme threats from the outside in order to justify disciplining the domestic populace. Moral panics and folk devils provide a ready means to achieve this construction. Moreover, "some fears are better than others for politicians, because some fears—such as the fear of being without health care or employment—are not amenable to quick-fix solutions and carry the risk of policy failure. The fear of terrorism, on the other hand, is perfect for the authorities because it is ubiquitous, catastrophic, opaque (reliant on government control of secret information) and rooted in deep cultural anxieties"

As George Yudice points out, "U.S., GATT [General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade] and WTO [World Trade Organization] negotiators have defined cultural goods such as films, television programmes, video and audio recordings, and books as commodities subject to the same kinds of trade conditions as cars and clothing"

We can say, with Pascale Casanova, that the "world literary space" is characterized by an "unequal trade" between center and periphery and that the ironic and complex work of a writer such as Hamid acknowledges the preeminence of the values represented by the literary center in defining the truly modern "literature of the present"

DEFINE: Clarifies Casanova's concept of 'world literary space' as defined by unequal trade between literary centers and peripheries.

This is one way to understand the frequent awkward insertions of sociological and historical information about Pakistan that dot the text; they may be for an uninitiated Western reader of the novel, but they can also be read as part of Changez's strategy of instructing but also unsettling the intradiegetic listener, who has only a basic knowledge of the culture into which he has stumbled.

XREF: Connects to narrative theories about unreliable or manipulative narrators who control information flow, and postcolonial literature aimed at Western audiences.

The da'wa, "call" or "summons," to believe in the true religion of Islam is practiced in the mosque movement by female da'iya, or teachers, whose job it is to guide their flock in righteous Islamic living, the negotiation of everyday challenges and moral conundrums, and correct dress and behavior. The da'wa movement also has welfare and charitable dimensions, too.

DEFINE: Clarifies that da'wa means 'call' or 'summons' and introduces the role of female da'iya as teachers in the mosque movement.

In this argument, I am largely following the secularization thesis as it has been applied to the English novel, with a full awareness that there is much more to be said about its nuances and sometimes outright contradictions as it plays out in slippery literary texts. Indeed, my point is to indicate the inadequacy of this thesis to a proper understanding of literary texts such as Minaret and to suggest a divergence between literary practice and critical modes of apprehending that practice when it comes to certain kinds of cultural difference.

SEED: A potential essay angle: how a dominant critical framework (secularization theory) falls short when applied to fiction from Muslim-majority or postcolonial contexts, and what frameworks might serve better.