Saba Mahmood has gone so far as to claim that the tendency to read all texts, including sacred ones, as symbolic systems rather than divine truth is the key difference between Christianity and Islam, creating a “normative secularity” against which Muslims—with their inability to put sufficient critical distance between themselves and their sacred text—are weighed in the balance and found wanting. … For her, secular antipathy is fortified by “a certain commitment to the poetic resources of the Judeo-Christian tradition—evident in a literary and aesthetic sensibility.”

XREF: Relates to Mahmood's broader critique of secularism and the politics of religious difference in her work on religious freedom.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 91