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.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 29