Even liberal tolerance-based responses to difference eventually collapse into assimilationist demands.

Evidence

In the erection and codification of “our” values—that which separates “us” from “them”—the categories are not neutral. Indeed, these categories are produced by and in turn are productive of Western normativity. They tend to view culture as essential and formative as opposed to constructed and negotiable. Culture talk tends to reify cultures as objects that have attributes driving individual behavior. This has led to attacks on Islam for its supposedly inevitable and predictable impact on its adherents, usually traced back to the myth that the Quran supposedly forces a literal interpretation and thus determines behavior, whereas the Bible and in turn Christianity have a tradition of critical interpretation. In assuming that culture causes people to do certain things, this view also exoticizes the Other—although, as we will see later in the book, this exoticization is less about cozy commodification and more about the frisson of vicariously experienced threat. More-liberal positions tend toward a minimization of difference on the basis of notions of a “shared humanity.” Such familiar modes of categorization fail to recognize their own cultural privilege and support for a universal system. Tolerance is mistaken for good citizenship in a move that eventually tends to yield to demands for assimilation when its notions of acceptable difference are challenged. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 79

Categorization

• XREF: Sharp analytical tool for Home Boy — the distinction between celebrating tolerance and quietly demanding assimilation maps onto how mainstream readers receive Naqvi’s protagonist.
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘the tolerance trap’ — how well-meaning multiculturalist readings of Muslim-character novels silently reimpose the assimilation demand they claim to reject.
• QUESTION: Where does this leave the liberal reviewer’s praise of Hamid/Naqvi? Their favorable reception might itself be a case of tolerance-as-assimilation.