A novel can contest secular assumptions using tropes ancient rather than new

Evidence

Of course, Najwa does develop and gain self-knowledge throughout the novel. Her judgments are really made questionable only by the normalized course of the secular romance. Indeed, one might say that in asking awkward questions of an assumed reader’s imaginative priorities and expectations, Minaret destabilizes the tacit assumptions of that mindset in a way that can be deemed postsecular. However, as I have tried to show, it does so through the use of narrative tropes that have cross-cultural resonances and that, far from reemerging as “postsecular,” actually never went away. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 506

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the core distinction the reader is seeking: a novel contests Islamophobia not by being novel or postsecular but by reactivating older, shared narrative lineages.