A shared narrative lineage counters Enlightenment reason used against Muslims

Evidence

The Bible as the starting point for a Western conception of collective imaginative endeavor offers a counterpoint to the postsecularist insistence on Kantian reason as the basis of the modern self. Although we can say that both Christian and Enlightenment traditions feed modern liberalism, they are faced today by societies in the West that are extremely diverse, containing a number of histories and traditions that make a claim on identity and representation. If the Enlightenment paradigm is often the stick used to beat the “unenlightened” Muslim subjects of Western multicultural states, then a stronger sense of a shared narrative lineage—including but going beyond the recognition that many biblical and Quranic stories have the same Abrahamic roots—becomes necessary. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 507

Categorization

• XREF: This is close to the heart of the reader’s hinge: it explains the mechanism by which shared story traditions can contest the Enlightenment-based othering that fuels Islamophobia. — connects to: Selective media focus on Muslim sexism constructs Western enlightenment as its opposite