Writers need the leeway to address any and all matters of concern, in particular those in which they feel a personal investment. However, Aslam's response indicates the extent to which the default expectations engendered by topicality are never neutral, least of all when the subject matter is what is commonly deemed Muslim religious or cultural behavior. In the hands of more ideological writers, the moral imperative to address injustice becomes almost inseparable from wholesale endorsement of the neoimperial civilizing mission of the United States. In these writers' novels, the confluence of Muslim religious doctrine with political power is inevitably disastrous, compromising individual liberty at every turn. Western intervention is then a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 26