Yet despite—or perhaps because of—this urge to measure and judge warring positions against one another, The Submission ends up falling into the classic liberal trap of seeing both sides of an argument but being unable to accept the necessity of choosing between them. For instance, the text’s urge to recuperate its Muslim characters onto the “good Muslim” side of the “good Muslim/bad Muslim” balance sheet merely leaves the criterion in place. There is never any chance that Mo will turn out to be a “bad Muslim” in these terms, so the book’s much-vaunted ambivalence is slightly bogus. Although it aims to get beyond these categories, its deployment of representative types does not, in the end, challenge conventions of framing. It is more successful in understanding Mo’s intransigence and hostility as a piece of defensive self-stereotyping and a (perhaps necessary) tactical betrayal of his better judgment. Yet the very fact that Mo is brought to explain at all—after such determined resistance—indicates a degree of uncertainty about where the reader’s sympathies may be heading. The explanation seems slightly out of character and more like part of a deliberate liberal softening by Waldman to make Mo more “acceptable” to us by diluting the enigma.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 294