Even then, both novels manage to concoct endings characterized by a sort of default-setting liberal wish fulfillment in which the forces of death and disorder are vanquished and the threat from the irrational negated. In both texts, acts of reading (and misreading)—of critical interpretation—are central to the resolution of the plot. For the satisfactory triumph of their endorsed value systems, both depend on the “conversion” of the threatening Other, and yet, at the same time, the faith displayed by characters is always haunted by its flipside, doubt.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 85