Ambivalence that never risks making a Muslim character bad is just liberal evasion.

Evidence

Yet despite—or perhaps because of—this urge to measure and judge warring positions against one another, The Submission ends up falling into the classic liberal trap of seeing both sides of an argument but being unable to accept the necessity of choosing between them. For instance, the text’s urge to recuperate its Muslim characters onto the “good Muslim” side of the “good Muslim/bad Muslim” balance sheet merely leaves the criterion in place. There is never any chance that Mo will turn out to be a “bad Muslim” in these terms, so the book’s much-vaunted ambivalence is slightly bogus. Although it aims to get beyond these categories, its deployment of representative types does not, in the end, challenge conventions of framing. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 294

Categorization

• DEFINE: Pinpoints the operative test distinguishing fiction that contests Islamophobia from fiction that only performs ambivalence while leaving the good/bad Muslim frame intact.
• XREF: Directly answers the guiding question about what distinguishes contesting from quietly reinforcing — a criterion to test against Hamid and Naqvi’s protagonists.