I would argue that the real political statement of the book—and hence its Islamophobia—in the end lies less in the strident denunciation of the Islamic Republic of Iran than in the universalist understanding of the meaning and value of literature that is proposed. The issue is not that Nafisi's readings of each of the great novels she teaches are somehow Islamophobic or wrong. It is rather that these readings nestle against a uncompromisingly painted backdrop in which the "high" cultural artifacts of the West are deemed always superior to those of Iran—save perhaps for a few treasures of Persian literature from centuries ago—and in which the values these artifacts enshrine are used very markedly to emphasize Western culture and, by inference, the West's social developmental trajectory as the norm, in comparison with which the Islamic East is always aberrant and inferior.

XREF: Connects to postcolonial critiques of universalism from scholars like Said, and debates about whether canonical Western literature smuggles in civilizational judgments.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 229