Fiction can blur the presumed secular-religious distinction through shared storytelling motifs.

Evidence

Despite this tension, in some of its key motifs, imagery, and patterning, Minaret problematizes the presumed distinction between the secular, the religious (and the postsecular), indicating cross-cultural historical continuities common to story making but often overlooked by culturally entrenched critical paradigms. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 472

Categorization

Category: Connection Points

• XREF: The claim that story-making continuities bridge secular and religious frames is directly usable for reading Naqvi’s Home Boy, where Islamic devotional registers and secular immigrant narrative interweave.

Related

• The secularization thesis fails to account for literature like Minaret (similarity 0.84)
• The secularization thesis fails to account for religious difference in fiction (similarity 0.82)
• The novel form carries three centuries of secular individualism shaping its possibilities (similarity 0.82)
• The religious and secular are co-constitutive, not opposed spheres (similarity 0.81)
• The novel form resists being repurposed for transcendental religious belief (similarity 0.81)
• Literary fiction’s world-making power makes it vital for combating Islamophobia (similarity 0.79)
• Secular and sacred narrative traditions interpenetrate and never diverged (similarity 0.79)
• The English novel tradition marginalizes religion in favor of materialist plotting (similarity 0.79)
• Christian and Islamic narratives share mythic structures that span traditions (similarity 0.78)
• A novel can contest secular assumptions using tropes ancient rather than new (similarity 0.78)
• Religious romance archetypes structure the secular Western novel’s conventions. (similarity 0.78)