Nafisi's Islamophobia exists in her text's surface-level endorsement of the neoconservative culturalist suspicion of Islamic societies as hostile and inferior and operates through aesthetic value judgments as much as through a depiction of the miasma of Orwellian tyranny that pervades Iran and overshadows the lives of her students. Nafisi proposes that the Euro-American novel embodies certain political potentialities—democracy through polyphony, dialogicality, and choice—even as she claims that the greatest novels are apolitical. Moreover, her attribution of these qualities to each of her chosen writers exists in tension with the stark fact that they are nowhere to be found in her own work; she always, but always, has the last word.

XREF: Relates to critiques of Reading Lolita in Tehran and post-9/11 neoconservative framings of Islamic societies in literary criticism.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 239