Even failed portrayals of Muslim extremism expose the West’s own comforting fairytales

Related

• Islamophobic claims serve to positively define their speakers rather than describe Muslims (similarity 0.86)
• History invents phantasms — fantasies attached to Muslim bodies — that remain powerful (similarity 0.85)
• Literature resists Islamophobic universalism by structuring feeling and imagining alternative experiences (similarity 0.84)
• Even anti-Islamophobic Muslim novels indirectly accept the frame they oppose. (similarity 0.83)
• American society explains rare Muslim terror through religion itself (similarity 0.83)
• Individual Muslim writers are not trapped by the interpretive frame that dominates their reception (similarity 0.83)
• Interrogating Western-ness is required to expunge Islamophobia (similarity 0.83)
• The West’s Muslims are fictional characters in a story about itself. (similarity 0.82)
• Ottoman proximity shifted Muslim-monster stories toward miscegenation fear (similarity 0.82)
• Medieval writers classified Muslim followers as monstrous races and devil minions. (similarity 0.82)
• A Muslim character’s refusal to explain can be a political contestation, not mere rigidity (similarity 0.82)
• Even antiwar critics defaulted to Islamic imagery for violence and unreason (similarity 0.81)
• Fiction contests Islamophobia either by direct Islamic subjectivity or by oblique readerly defamiliarization. (similarity 0.81)
• The native-informer dynamic lets writers simultaneously acknowledge and deny their Muslim origins (similarity 0.81)
• Global fiction contests Islamophobia by refusing the clash-of-civilizations model (similarity 0.81)