Both hostile stereotyping and well-meaning PR equally distort a public Muslim figure’s identity.

Evidence

However, the text shows us that whatever posturing might take place is a product of a context in which Islamophobia and rampant stereotyping put pressure on participants, driving a wedge between sense of self and public image. Mo is at the center of a perfect storm of misrepresentation. As a Muslim, he is automatically branded a terrorist by the right-wing press. When news spreads that a Muslim has won the memorial design competition, in the absence of a photograph newspapers mock up a silhouette headshot of a terrorist in a balaclava (51–52). In her stories about him, Alyssa Spier writes in clichés and prefers to use his full first name, Mohammed, because “Mo didn’t have the ring—theological, historical, hysterical” (96)—to elicit the required response. If Islamophobic stereotyping is the most blatant and obvious in the book, Mo also feels under pressure from more well-meaning attempts to manage his image through public relations. The attempts by Issam Malik’s organization, MACC, to “humanize” him as a proud American (172) and to make him a figurehead for other campaigns (80) feel just as artificial to him. We are invited to reflect on the extent to which Mo as a public figure is made up by others—a patchwork of their darkest fears or utopian fantasies—and the extent to which identity is continually being shaped by experience. In the maelstrom of controversy, Mo—like Claire, who imagines her identity in terms of a series of nested matryoshka dolls—has difficulty locating a final, core identity for himself, something that might in the end have a liberating effect. He tells a girlfriend, “Everyday I’m different.… I’m not the person you met three weeks ago. If this keeps up, in two weeks I won’t be the person you know now. You can’t misrepresent an object in motion”(155). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 288

Categorization

• XREF: Directly reusable for Changez in The Reluctant Fundamentalist — he too is made up by others (the firefly photographer, his interlocutor) and struggles to locate a core self; the ‘object in motion’ line is a sharper articulation of Changez’s anti-narrative stance.
• DEFINE: ‘Misrepresentation’ here gets a precise contrast: hostile stereotyping vs. admiring image-management both distort — useful vocabulary for distinguishing novels that expose this double bind.