Death obituaries can fix Muslims into a flattened good Muslim archetype

Evidence

Interestingly, the novel has what might be described as a double ending: two differently keyed scenes reveal what became of the elusive Shaman and suggest that the migrant to New York might nowadays be in search of a place that no longer exists. In the first ending, Chuck—packed and on the verge of leaving for Karachi—discovers Mohammed Shah’s fate in the “Portraits of Grief” section of the New York Times. He was killed at the World Trade Center. Headlined “MOHAMMED ‘MO’ SHAH: NO FRIEND OF FUNDAMENTALISM,” the column paints a picture of someone unrecognizable from the party-throwing, cigarette-smuggling, pornography-consuming man about town Chuck remembers. He is made into an archetypal “good Muslim,” fixed and valorized in death; a coworker in their insurance company declares, “He was like us … he wanted to get married, start a family, and all that good stuff” (213–14, emphasis added). The short obituary co-opts Mo as it misrepresents him—the final instance of the split between appearance and reality that has been at the heart of the novel’s preoccupations. Chuck reflects on what has been left out: “The story was simple, black-and-white: the man was a Muslim, not a terrorist” (214). Yet even in that designation, all nuance, any sense of the flesh-and-blood being behind the labels, with all his flaws and foibles, is obscured. There is no space for the real Mo Shah outside of the “good Muslim/bad Muslim” paradigm. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 307

Categorization

• XREF: Central to the reader’s hinge work: this close reading shows how a text meant to memorialize can reinforce the very binary the novel contests — a tool for reading both Naqvi and Hamid as evidence about media framing.
• SEED: Article angle: ‘Portraits of Grief’ as a form of state-sanctioned biographical flattening — how obituaries become zones of ideological co-optation, and what fiction can recover that journalism cannot.
• DEFINE: Morey models what ‘contesting’ Islamophobia means concretely: the novel exposes the good/bad Muslim paradigm by refusing to let even sympathetic media framing go unexamined — a useful benchmark for the reader’s analysis.