In other words, Minaret appears to reveal the difficulty of attempting to move the secular individualist form of the novel back to its spiritual roots, to fill an art form etched by three hundred years of secular individualism with a sense of God as a real presence. The difficulty of this task is reflected in the novel’s interpretative crises and challenges and in the collision between its spiritual agenda and the banality of its chosen form.

QUESTION: What interpretive crises specifically expose the form's secular inertia? Curious whether the collision is inherent to the novel genre or specific to this work.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 477