Aesthetic universalism itself can quietly reinforce Islamophobia

Evidence

If all this and the memoir’s overriding investment in the aesthetic and formal appreciation of literature smack of the complacencies of the liberal humanist school of criticism from the early twentieth century, that is because the book is that school’s inheritor, and part of the aim is once more to revalidate its universalist claims for the contemporary world. Indeed, I would argue that the real political statement of the book—and hence its Islamophobia—in the end lies less in the strident denunciation of the Islamic Republic of Iran than in the universalist understanding of the meaning and value of literature that is proposed. The issue is not that Nafisi’s readings of each of the great novels she teaches are somehow Islamophobic or wrong. It is rather that these readings nestle against a uncompromisingly painted backdrop in which the “high” cultural artifacts of the West are deemed always superior to those of Iran—save perhaps for a few treasures of Persian literature from centuries ago—and in which the values these artifacts enshrine are used very markedly to emphasize Western culture and, by inference, the West’s social developmental trajectory as the norm, in comparison with which the Islamic East is always aberrant and inferior. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 229

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the key concept that ‘contest vs. quietly reinforce’ hinges on: Islamophobia located in aesthetic ideology rather than explicit denunciation.
• QUESTION: Does this universalist-backdrop test apply to The Reluctant Fundamentalist, whose narrator does the West-vs-East comparative framing but reverses who holds the norms?
• XREF: Directly relevant to the Edward Said tradition of reading liberal humanism/canon-formation as complicit; connects to orientalism debates the reader knows from Said’s Culture and Imperialism.