The Black Album’s conventionally modern resolution fails to disturb those negative opinions that many readers in the mid-1990s—and most certainly since then—might have about the growth of Muslim identity claims. To that extent, the ending has a curiously slack, comforting quality, with hero and heroine driving off into the sunset, having vanquished the foes of both repression and domesticity. This avowedly individualist ending is most certainly not an endorsement of multiculturalism; indeed, all the damage to which Shahid and Deedee have been witness can be read as a product of the misguided indulgence that has made such outrageous claims possible.

XREF: Connects to debates about literary endings and political commitment in fiction, similar to critiques of Rushdie and postcolonial novel conclusions.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 182