Critics charge that pious Muslim fiction can reinforce Islamophobia by romanticizing renunciation.

Evidence

Recent attacks on Aboulela by critics such as Sadia Abbas and Waïl Hassan have focused on the pious passivity displayed by Minaret’s protagonist Najwa and the way the novel as a whole appears to endorse types of female renunciation and doctrinal orthodoxy favored by the stricter Salafi theology currently gaining ground in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. They cite approving comments made by the protagonist about sharia punishments and her desire to subjugate herself to protective males. Abbas in particular picks up on Saba Mahmood’s influential analysis of those orthodox Muslim women in Egypt’s dawa movement, for whom piety “is performative, behavioural and yet creative of subjectivity.” These insights can be applied to Najwa’s choice to renounce the secular satisfactions of romantic love and material independence in favor of subordination to religious norms. This position not only chooses submission over willed action in the world but also, in Aboulela, is dismissive of other modes of agency, such as feminism and Marxism, whose materialist focus dooms them as forever unsatisfactory to the woman of faith. Hassan sees Najwa’s choice as a complete disavowal of freedom and agency that plays into the hands of right-wing interpretations of Islam. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 475

Categorization

• XREF: This is the exact analytic wedge the reader wants: a novel that ostensibly celebrates Muslim selfhood can, through pious passivity, feed right-wing readings of Islam — directly parallel to how to judge Home Boy and The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
• QUESTION: If celebrating orthodox female piety can reinforce Islamophobia, does the same apply to novels portraying male Muslim victimhood or melancholy — the register Naqvi and Hamid deploy?
• SEED: The axis ‘pious passivity vs. critical agency’ as a way to distinguish contesting from reinforcing Islamophobia could structure the reader’s whole argument.