A conventionally liberating novel ending can quietly reinforce anti-Muslim prejudice.

Evidence

Shahid has learned to shake off the influence of religious fundamentalism to embrace life, love, and provisionality rather than abstinence and the promise of eternity. The Black Album’s conventionally modern resolution fails to disturb those negative opinions that many readers in the mid-1990s—and most certainly since then—might have about the growth of Muslim identity claims. To that extent, the ending has a curiously slack, comforting quality, with hero and heroine driving off into the sunset, having vanquished the foes of both repression and domesticity. This avowedly individualist ending is most certainly not an endorsement of multiculturalism; indeed, all the damage to which Shahid and Deedee have been witness can be read as a product of the misguided indulgence that has made such outrageous claims possible. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 182

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s hinge thesis: the distinction between contesting and quietly reinforcing Islamophobia — a text that outwardly celebrates freedom can still affirm the reader’s negative view of Muslim identity claims.
• SEED: This gives the reader a testable criterion: does an ‘individualist’ or ‘liberating’ resolution undermine Islamophobia by complexity, or just re-stage the familiar escape-from-fundamentalism plot? Apply to Hamid and Naqvi’s endings.