However, we should be wary of seeing all literary and cultural perspectives that are critical of Islam as “Islamophobic.” Blanket denunciations are unhelpful because they tend to close down debate and are insufficiently attentive to the status of many of these texts as creative products of art and imagination—something that makes them prone to the same forces of hesitation and inconsistency that always animate those activities. In particular, the novel—with the modes of address it employs and with its unique purchase on the imagination of a reader who is required to create in his or her mind a world and thereafter to populate it—cannot be reduced to pure “message,” whether positive or negative.

DEFINE: Clarifies why the label 'Islamophobic' fails for literary texts: novels are creative products prone to hesitation and inconsistency, not reducible to pure message.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 22