This is a crucial distinction and one remarked upon in Saba Mahmood's analysis of Egyptian Muslim women when she notes the Western critical tendency to misread Islamist movements as "a recoding of [Arab] nationalist sentiment in religious idioms." Both Mahmood and Aboulela reject this as an inaccurate understanding of the role of Islam as an all-encompassing internationalist solidarity; in Minaret, Najwa remarks on the many nations represented in the weekly Quran classes she attends at her local mosque. In pitting the religious against the national and the personal against the political, the novel clearly seeks to endorse the former in each case.

XREF: Connects Saba Mahmood's critique of Western misreading of Islamist movements to Aboulela's novel, building a shared corrective lens.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 485