The challenge of producing a religious novel may appear, on the face of it, to be simply a matter of writing sympathetically about religious characters and perspectives. However, in the Western (and specifically English) novelistic and critical tradition—within which postcolonialism occupies an important but contested space—one must contend with what is often taken to be the three-hundred-year-old drift away from spirituality and faith toward a materialist working out of narrative plot and human choices. … God does not intervene directly, and where the guiding hand of Providence is seen, it tends to be equally explicable in terms of coincidence or, in other cases, heavy-handed omniscient meddling by the author.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 499