A novel can criticize explicit Islamophobia while endorsing its underlying assumptions
Evidence
However, perhaps the most telling part of their exchange comes when Riaz, having described the communitarian aims of his own work, asks Shahid what “standpoint” he writes from, only to receive the reply, “There is no … standpoint”(174). This exchange encapsulates all that has gone before and puts Shahid (and Kureishi) in the company of those writers who in the days after 9/11 were to reassert the liberal universalism of the Western literary tradition as a main line of defense against Islamic terrorism. Here, I would draw attention to the way in which Shahid’s reply underwrites the novel’s broader disavowal of positions that are seen as a threat to foundational cultural values. Although Zulma’s white lover, Jump, is ridiculed for his paranoid Islamophobia, in which he imagines a Europe overrun by Muslim hordes (190), the underlying endorsement is of those perceived Western values supposedly now under threat from Islamic identity politics. The rearticulation of the notion of an unfettered, free-floating artist, responsible to no one but himself, is juxtaposed against a kind of fanaticism in the Other that is central to contemporary Islamophobia: the herd mentality, the absence of critical thought, the propensity for violence. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 178
Categorization
- XREF: This is the sharpest articulation of the contest vs. reinforce distinction the reader wants — the very mechanism by which a novel critical of bigotry can still quietly reinforce it. Directly usable on Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Naqvi’s Home Boy.
- SEED: Essay angle: how liberal-universalist protagonists in post-9/11 fiction critique the Islamophobe while preserving his cultural frame — the standpoint-denial as its own implicit standpoint.
- DEFINE: Introduces ‘standpoint’ denial as an analytical category distinguishing overt critique from underlying endorsement — a transferable term for the reader’s own close readings.