Muslim misery memoirs partake in large measure of the culturalist discourse that sees Muslims and Muslim lands as inherently different and threatening. They depict Islam as a source of oppression, drawing on an Orientalist historical template that for good measure also evokes recognizable types of totalitarian enemy—Nazism, communism—and the kinds of oppression of minorities and women the West has supposedly eradicated. Hence, they inscribe the regions they depict somewhat schizophrenically: as a potential threat to those freedoms cherished in the West if left unconfronted and as so backward that they are rendered supine in the face of a neoimperial project of rescue and modernization. The books specialize in moral certainties and primary colors when it comes to character and background. Their overarching message appears to be that rescue by the West, which is to say the U.S. military, cannot come soon enough for the benighted figures who haunt their pages and who suffer all manner of deprivation and abuse in the name of Islam. Moreover, as I show, such texts operate through a kind of exotic metonymy in which details of life under Islamic oppression come to stand in for a whole culture, reduced to certain extreme essences that operate to evacuate history and keep the reader firmly focused on personalized narratives that always claim greater political resonance.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 206