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.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 440