Comic treatment of Muslim characters can quietly reproduce secularist prejudice

Evidence

Yet for all the characteristic lightness of touch, in taking this line—equating Western lifestyles with free thinking, questioning, and imagination, as against Islamic robotic quiescence—Kureishi throws in his lot with a sort of no-nonsense, muscular secularism of the kind nowadays associated with Amis, McEwan, Rushdie, and the late Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris: a critique of religion as superstition that primarily has Islam in its sights. … For instance, Bart Moore-Gilbert has noted how “the predominantly comic register of The Black Album expresses its author’s perception that the threat of ‘fundamentalism’ is minimal and that its exponents are primarily ridiculous and self-deluded rather than evil or, indeed, rational actors.… The inescapable inference to be drawn from The Black Album is that the more complexly drawn (‘liberal’) characters are more fully human, as well as being more worthy citizens, than their ‘fundamentalist’ antagonists.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 180

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘muscular secularism’ as the late-Hitchens/Amis/McEwan critique of religion that trains primarily on Islam.
• XREF: Sharper tool for reading Home Boy and The Reluctant Fundamentalist: Kureishi’s comic register is a benchmark against which Naqvi and Hamid’s tonal choices can be measured.