Evenhanded novelistic treatment can falsely equate anti-Islamophobia activists with Islamophobes

Evidence

As a Bangladeshi woman, Asma’s ability to traverse even the immigrant spaces of New York is severely circumscribed. She rarely ventures out from her home in Little Dhaka, as their part of Brooklyn is known, considering Manhattan “like another country” (71). Moreover, in a move that perhaps indicates that The Submission, despite its concern for stereotyping in the media, does not always escape stereotypes of its own, the restraints on Asma are depicted as cultural as well as Islamophobic. She begins as the archetypal oppressed Muslim woman, cowed by the patriarchal conventions of her community. Her tentative attempts to break free of tradition are crushed under the weight of convention and respectability—as when she attempts to rescue a neighbor from domestic abuse but finds her efforts rejected even by the victim, whose concern is primarily for reputation. Arin Keeble suggests that “the characterization of Asma that emerges,” despite this surface image, “is of a strong compassionate woman who won’t accept her husband being written out of history.” That may be so, but her ultimate fate reveals the combined weight of a paranoid host nation and an imposed collective responsibility to community. Her decision to speak up for Mo’s design at the public hearing brings plaudits from many Americans, who see her as acting against silencing oppression by Muslim males. Yet it also brings renewed scrutiny to her own residency status and that of fellow members of the Bangladeshi community in New York, many of whom are also irregular, and leads to an order for her expedited removal from the country. Her murder at the hands of an unknown knifeman—Is he a right-wing extremist or an outraged Bangladeshi community member?—takes place in the full glare of the nation’s media, for whom she has become a cause célèbre. In Waldman’s novel, there is no question but that those most directly at risk from hatred and Islamophobia will always pay the highest price. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 292 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the widespread student protests against it across the United States, universities have sought to prove their equal commitment to Jewish and Muslim students by addressing both antisemitism and Islamophobia. This impulse to treat antisemitism and Islamophobia as if they are analogous phenomena emerging from this war creates a false equivalence that masks the deep asymmetries embedded in ethnic cleansing, apartheid, military occupation, forced starvation, and genocide. — Evelyn Alsultany, Antisemitism and Islamophobia The…, 23 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim
• XREF: connects to: Formal ambiguities can contest Islamophobia even in sympathetic texts; Even distinguished literary novelists voice crude anti-Muslim prejudice; Even anti-Islamophobic Muslim novels indirectly accept the frame they oppose. (+6 more)

Related

• Novels encode their stance on Islamic identity through form as much as content. (similarity 0.90)
• A novel contesting Islamophobia can still quietly reinforce liberal-manichean binaries in its characterization. (similarity 0.90)
• A liberal-humanist stance toward novels can itself smuggle in Islamophobic assumptions (similarity 0.89)
• Fiction can reinforce racial stereotypes even while nominally condemning extremism (similarity 0.87)
• A novel can undermine its own polyphonic argument by monolithically portraying Muslims. (similarity 0.85)
• Anti-Islamophobic novels can still reproduce the stereotype of the oppressed Muslim woman (similarity 0.85)
• Islamophobia in literature can reside in universalist reading practices rather than overt denunciation (similarity 0.85)
• Novels that aim for evenhandedness can leave the good Muslim-bad Muslim binary intact (similarity 0.82)
• Even distinguished literary novelists voice crude anti-Muslim prejudice (similarity 0.81)
• A novel’s ambivalence can quietly reinforce the very stereotypes it claims to contest (similarity 0.79)
• Anti-Islamophobia novels can themselves profit from trading in Muslim stereotypes. (similarity 0.79)
• Formal ambiguities can contest Islamophobia even in sympathetic texts (similarity 0.78)
• Contesting Islamophobia in fiction requires defamiliarizing narrative form, not merely invoking empathy. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Anti-Islamophobic novels can still reproduce the stereotype of the oppressed Muslim woman #exemplifies (0.60) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 292
• Treating antisemitism and Islamophobia as analogous masks asymmetric power relations. #corroborates (0.50) — Evelyn Alsultany, Antisemitism and Islamophobia The…, 23
• Islamophilia and Islamophobia share assumptions that equally harm Muslim inclusion #corroborates (0.50)