Appealing to readers’ craving for authentic Muslim ‘Otherness’ erases cross-cultural narrative commonalities.

Evidence

But Frye’s model makes clear that the authority of mythological systems is based on their endorsement by a situated tradition: “Belief, I am saying, is essentially a form of attachment to a community: in other words belief is also primarily social in reference.” This encapsulates the challenge for Aboulela as a diasporic subject and a Muslim addressing an audience and a literary community that for the most part will not share her beliefs. She is attempting to articulate a mythic tradition perceived to be different to that of its recipients, thereby running the risk of exoticism or dismissal. … However, it is precisely the anthropological desire for a “different” spokesperson, an authentic Other who will take us inside the devout Muslim’s experiences—a mode of reading with which Aboulela chooses deliberately to conciliate—that will result in such commonalities being downplayed or overlooked. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 504

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s core task: the ‘authentic other spokesperson’ reading dynamic describes the trap facing Home Boy and The Reluctant Fundamentalist when taken as documentary evidence of Muslim experience rather than literary craft.
• SEED: Essay angle: how review culture positions Muslim novelists as native informants, and what close reading must do to resist that framing — using the reader’s two novels as cases.
• QUESTION: Exactly which stylistic choices constitute Aboulela’s ‘deliberate conciliation’ with the authentic-Other mode of reading, and how would one identify analogous conciliation in Hamid or Naqvi?