All of her decisions tend toward the consolidation or preservation of community and family rather than toward the individual fulfillment expected of a novelistic protagonist. Losing her own family makes her acutely aware of the value of kinship support networks, and she gives up Tamer in part to stop him from "sinning" against his mother through disobedience and with the aim of keeping his family together.

XREF: Connects to the novelistic-protagonist tradition from classic literary criticism, where protagonists typically pursue individual desires against social constraints.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 484