Even posthumous valorization as a good Muslim erases the real person

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. … 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

• DEFINE: Concretely defines the good Muslim/bad Muslim paradigm — the binary that flattens any Muslim into a legible category, with no space for irreducible particularity.
• XREF: The phrase ‘He was like us’ is the exact assimilationist alibi that structures liberal tolerance discourse — connects to Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist treatment of being claimed as exception. — connects to: Posthumous disgrace can function as a ritual assassination of a name — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 193
• SEED: An angle on how obituaries and memorial rhetorics police the dead into usable categories — posthumous co-option as a site of identity governance.
• QUESTION: Does a representation that contests Islamophobia need to refuse even the positive ‘good Muslim’ framing, granting characters irreducible flaws rather than sanitizing them in death?