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.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 292