A global-market novel can only gesture at its own complicity, never escape it

Evidence

However, because there is no space outside this market for the modern author who seeks an international readership, the text is able only to point to its circumscribed position, not to transcend it. The result is what Geoffrey Nash has called The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s “purposive ambiguity”: “operating entirely within a western discourse it mounts a guarded resistance on behalf of the precariously placed stranger while still making overtures of reason to an audience he [Hamid] perhaps wishes to placate.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 443

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives a precise name and gloss for Hamid’s signature register: purposive ambiguity, the text’s contested-but-complicit stance.
• SEED: Reader’s hinge point: this is Morey’s clearest account of contesting-vs-reinforcing as a spectrum, directly applicable to framing Hamid and Naqvi as evidence rather than illustration.