A Muslim woman’s headscarf worn by a liberal can erase Muslim gender struggles

Evidence

Sadia Abbas is unpersuaded that Annabel’s brief experience of incarceration equates to Issa’s lifelong one. Instead, she reads the lawyer’s character as an embodiment of an impotent liberal guilt working its way through A Most Wanted Man. Annabel’s wealthy family connections ensure that she is never in the same kind of mortal danger as Issa. Rather, her status as figurehead of liberal remorse for Islamophobia is inscribed by her habit of respectfully donning a head scarf when in Issa’s presence—something Abbas sees as an example of “left-liberalism’s intense anxiety about doing right by Muslims” and at the same time an act that “displaces the contempt for women in Issa’s version of Islam” and “works as an erasure of struggles over patriarchy and misogyny in Muslim contexts.” Abbas’s reading correctly identifies a basic liberal ambivalence at the heart of Le Carré’s novel but misrecognizes it in the ambiguous and highly charged interplay between Issa and Annabel. Reading the book as motivated by the desire to “make restitution for America’s conduct in the War on Terror” miscasts Le Carré as some kind of spokesman for the United States rather than as a dissident voice critical of broader Western complicity with the neoconservative agendas of Washington; it also risks misinterpreting the text as a ceremonial act of contrition rather than as a complex and ambivalent novel. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 331

Categorization

• XREF: The Abbas reading is a central analytical tension the reader needs: distinguishing a novel that contests Islamophobia from one performing restitution — exactly their guiding question for Hamid and Naqvi.
• DEFINE: Introduces the criterion of the ‘dissident voice’ vs. ‘ceremonial contrition’ as a way to distinguish contesting from reinforcing.
• SEED: Essay angle: when does a novel’s sympathetic headscarf — literal or figurative — become a performance that erases the very Muslim agency it purports to honor? Testable against Hamid’s Changez and Naqvi’s characters.