Nonetheless, we will see that both The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Minaret face similar challenges in terms of negotiating their place in what we might call a literary “market for the Muslim.” This global market is both a commercial one, in the case of Hamid’s text, and, for Aboulela’s novel, a critical market for interpreting the Muslim writer that maps onto prevailing orthodoxies about how secular modernity is the defining feature of a West that has evolved beyond the irrational consolations of religion. We need to think about how these categories operate, how they are circulated in a world eager for answers to “the Muslim problem,” and—most crucially—what they leave out.

SEED: This is a strong angle for a critical essay on how Western literary markets constrain what Muslim writers can produce and how they are read — the 'market for the Muslim' concept could anchor a piece. XREF: Connects to Hamid's 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist' and Aboulela's 'Minaret', and to broader postcolonial criticism on how the West consumes literature from the periphery.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 440