Amis demands Islam follow a forced linear path of Western secularization
Evidence
In The Second Plane, an uncompromising tone with a threatening edge intrudes more than once across the essays, assuming a necessitarian, one-size-fits-all view of history wherein Islam must be forced to tread the same path as the modern enlightened West. Islam must be required to leave its “convulsed,” “medieval” stage and evolve as the West did after the wars of religion. But Amis fears that this won’t happen voluntarily: “We would have to sit through a Renaissance and a Reformation and then await an Enlightenment. And we are not going to do that,” he states firmly in the first essay (9). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 95
Categorization
- XREF: Amis’s ‘sit through a Renaissance and a Reformation and then await an Enlightenment’ developmental coercion is the paradigmatic civilizational-evolutionary narrative that The Reluctant Fundamentalist and its secular-liberal readers implicitly or explicitly invoke. — connects to: Liberal tolerance of reformed Islam coexists with nativist demands to end Islam itself — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 303; Turkey could reposition itself as leader of the Islamic world by abandoning Western secularism; Amis casts Islam as a medieval stage the West must forcibly drag forward (+2 more)
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Liberal tolerance of reformed Islam coexists with nativist demands to end Islam itself — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 303; Turkey could reposition itself as leader of the Islamic world by abandoning Western secularism; Amis casts Islam as a medieval stage the West must forcibly drag forward (+2 more)