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.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 25