It might even be possible to consider their prevarications an instance of latent Islamophobia: that unconscious prejudice against the kind of unpredictable personal coordinates the observant Muslim character might display. (Issa in Le Carré’s novel takes us some way in that direction, but his religious conservatism is disarmed by the weight of Western perfidy bearing down on him.) Although we are always aware that somewhere beyond the book covers real people are suffering hardship and death because of neoimperialist policies and the forces they have unleashed, these policies and forces’ imprint in the post-9/11 thriller is secondary to considerations of Western ethics and Western moral scruples. In the end, the liberal thriller seems to have a strange, evasive relationship to confronting Islamophobia, dodging any engagement with the real racial-cultural coordinates of resurgent majoritarian nationalisms. Although scrupulously not claiming to speak on behalf of suffering Muslim victims in the war on terror, the liberal thriller writers I have examined here nonetheless reaffirm a culturalist bias in choosing not to imaginatively enter the space of the real victims of Islamophobia.

DEFINE: Latent Islamophobia is defined as unconscious prejudice against unpredictable personal coordinates of observant Muslim characters — a subtle but operative concept in the passage.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 379