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.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 144