Critical terms carry an unseen Western provenance that frames Muslim texts

Evidence

I want to make clear that I am not saying that all novelists and book reviewers are Islamophobes or that criticism is inherently Islamophobic. What I am arguing is that we need to be more historically aware of the provenance of the terms and values we employ to approach texts by and about Muslims (as well as by culturally different writers and about people more generally). If we see literature and criticism as systems in their longer context, we will also there find all the elements by which Muslims have been and continue to be framed within Western culture as a whole. There are enough ideologues at both extremes happy to perpetuate and exploit such binary thinking. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 33

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• XREF: Extends the Suleri/Kudchedkar ‘modernity and its others’ frame from chapter 1; the reader can apply the provenance check to how Hamid and Naqvi get reviewed.

Related

• Dominant frames of understanding constrain reception, not Muslim authors’ choices themselves (similarity 0.85)
• Literary criticism should read Muslim texts as intercultural negotiation, not alien-mind keys (similarity 0.84)
• The term Islamophobia remains useful despite academic objections to it. (similarity 0.84)
• Critical tools for Muslim fiction need historical self-awareness of their provenance (similarity 0.84)
• Literary works operate within three nested frames that shape their meaning. (similarity 0.83)
• Western critics cannot transcend the Islamophobic frame from outside (similarity 0.83)
• Contesting novels deconstruct the frames, not just the content, of the Islamophobia debate (similarity 0.83)
• Novels contesting Islamophobia are enmeshed in the very market that trades on it (similarity 0.83)
• Even anti-Islamophobic Muslim novels indirectly accept the frame they oppose. (similarity 0.82)
• Islamophobic discourse falsely insists the Quran demands literalist reading while the Bible permits critique. (similarity 0.82)
• Literature’s talismanic power in Islamophobia debates depends on its interpretive openness (similarity 0.82)
• Western literary criticism’s perceived openness contrasts with a misread notion of a closed Quran. (similarity 0.81)
• Liberal novelists cast literature itself as a core Western value threatened by Islam (similarity 0.81)
• Literature resists Islamophobic universalism by structuring feeling and imagining alternative experiences (similarity 0.81)
• Novels can reproduce or contest Islamophobia irrespective of authorial intent through formal features (similarity 0.81)