A liberal-humanist stance toward novels can itself smuggle in Islamophobic assumptions

Evidence

As a Bangladeshi woman, Asma’s ability to traverse even the immigrant spaces of New York is severely circumscribed. She rarely ventures out from her home in Little Dhaka, as their part of Brooklyn is known, considering Manhattan “like another country” (71). Moreover, in a move that perhaps indicates that The Submission, despite its concern for stereotyping in the media, does not always escape stereotypes of its own, the restraints on Asma are depicted as cultural as well as Islamophobic. She begins as the archetypal oppressed Muslim woman, cowed by the patriarchal conventions of her community. Her tentative attempts to break free of tradition are crushed under the weight of convention and respectability—as when she attempts to rescue a neighbor from domestic abuse but finds her efforts rejected even by the victim, whose concern is primarily for reputation. Arin Keeble suggests that “the characterization of Asma that emerges,” despite this surface image, “is of a strong compassionate woman who won’t accept her husband being written out of history.” That may be so, but her ultimate fate reveals the combined weight of a paranoid host nation and an imposed collective responsibility to community. Her decision to speak up for Mo’s design at the public hearing brings plaudits from many Americans, who see her as acting against silencing oppression by Muslim males. Yet it also brings renewed scrutiny to her own residency status and that of fellow members of the Bangladeshi community in New York, many of whom are also irregular, and leads to an order for her expedited removal from the country. Her murder at the hands of an unknown knifeman—Is he a right-wing extremist or an outraged Bangladeshi community member?—takes place in the full glare of the nation’s media, for whom she has become a cause célèbre. In Waldman’s novel, there is no question but that those most directly at risk from hatred and Islamophobia will always pay the highest price. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 292 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim
• XREF: connects to: Liberal reading habits themselves can fabricate Muslim difference; Liberal humanist fiction erases Muslim difference by staging conversion through canonical English verse; Novels’ formal features, not stated sympathy, determine their political effects (+28 more)

Related

• A novel contesting Islamophobia can still quietly reinforce liberal-manichean binaries in its characterization. (similarity 0.96)
• Novels encode their stance on Islamic identity through form as much as content. (similarity 0.94)
• Islamophobia in literature can reside in universalist reading practices rather than overt denunciation (similarity 0.92)
• A novel can undermine its own polyphonic argument by monolithically portraying Muslims. (similarity 0.90)
• Evenhanded novelistic treatment can falsely equate anti-Islamophobia activists with Islamophobes (similarity 0.89)
• Fiction can reinforce racial stereotypes even while nominally condemning extremism (similarity 0.89)
• Anti-Islamophobic novels can still reproduce the stereotype of the oppressed Muslim woman (similarity 0.86)
• Even distinguished literary novelists voice crude anti-Muslim prejudice (similarity 0.83)
• Novels that aim for evenhandedness can leave the good Muslim-bad Muslim binary intact (similarity 0.83)
• Liberal humanist fiction erases Muslim difference by staging conversion through canonical English verse (similarity 0.83)
• Liberal novels often center non-Muslim protagonists in Islamophobia stories (similarity 0.81)
• Liberal-humanist endings depend on converting the threatening Other. (similarity 0.81)
• The novel’s liberal individualist form inherently limits what it can contest (similarity 0.80)
• A novel’s ambivalence can quietly reinforce the very stereotypes it claims to contest (similarity 0.80)
• A novel can expose stereotypes yet trap its own character within them (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Novels that aim for evenhandedness can leave the good Muslim-bad Muslim binary intact #exemplifies (0.80)
• Evenhanded novelistic treatment can falsely equate anti-Islamophobia activists with Islamophobes #exemplifies (0.80)
• Anti-Islamophobic novels can still reproduce the stereotype of the oppressed Muslim woman #exemplifies (0.80) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 292
• Liberal novels often center non-Muslim protagonists in Islamophobia stories #complicates (0.60) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 355
• Formal ambiguities can contest Islamophobia even in sympathetic texts #corroborates (0.60)