A novel can rescue liberal humanism while denying voice to the Muslim other

Evidence

However, I would argue that the use of insistent negatives in the passage also says something about Casa’s status as a figure that we are, in the end, not being invited to identify with. Indeed, it is here, in the black-and-white framing of motivation and thus in the manipulation of our sympathy for liberal ends, that some of the ambivalences in Aslam’s worlding begin to appear. There is a strong investment here in the old humanist idea that exposure to literature and being widely read make one a better, more-rounded person. Marcus, Lara, and David—all hailing from the non-Muslim world—are to varying degrees perspicacious and well read: able to swap literary quotations and trade historical anecdotes in vast quantities. Casa, in contrast, is a creature finally to be pitied for his untutored lack of self-awareness. … Yet when he moves the page within range of a lamp, he discovers that nothing has come out: “for some reason the pen had held onto its ink” (378). Casa is quick to attribute the failure to Allah’s displeasure. Yet by this stage we have been prepared to recognize that, from a literature-as-human-experience point of view, Casa is necessarily beyond words—about to write himself out of the story altogether with an act of apocalyptic violence. Thus, he cannot articulate his own story; only the benevolent narrator can do that for him. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 405

Categorization

• DEFINE: The ‘literature-as-human-experience’ frame is named as the value system Aslam deploys; the Muslim character cannot self-narrate within it.
• XREF: Connects directly to Zimbardo’s work on narrating the Muslim other, and to how Hamid’s Changez is given full first-person voice — an inverse of Morey’s Casa point.
• SEED: The ‘benevolent narrator’ who speaks for the illiterate radical as a liberal rescue gesture is exactly the contest-vs-reinforce test to run on Hamid and Naqvi.