A novel counters fundamentalism by affiliating with a shared literary inheritance

Evidence

The “worlding” undertaken by Aslam’s novel comes in part from those preceding writers whose stories provide intertextual markers for the reader and who are often directly name-checked. The book’s global bearings are confirmed by an international array that includes Virgil, Leo Tolstoy, Anna Akhmatova, St. Augustine, the Quran, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ferdowsi’s epic poem the Shahnama, “Rapunzel,” Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim, the biblical story of David and Jonathan, First Corinthians, and William Blake, among many others. They represent a human inheritance of knowledge to set against the fundamentalist nihilism of the Taliban with their contempt for culture and original thought. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 400

Categorization

• XREF: A concrete tool for comparing how Naqvi (Home Boy) and Hamid (The Reluctant Fundamentalist) build their own intertextual canopies to contest or reinforce Islamophobic framing.