Genocide requires no active denial of humanity, only relegating victims to marginality.

Evidence

Part of the horror of Burnt Shadows lies in its exposure of the fact that such sins can be the product of expediency and willed ignorance as much as of premeditated acts. Much later Hiroko reflects on what she has learned in an observation that sums up the novel’s politics: “When Konrad first heard of the concentration camps he said you have to deny people their humanity in order to decimate them. You don’t.… You just have to put them in a little corner of the big picture” (362). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 432

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: An inverted account of how atrocity is enabled — not by active dehumanization but by mundane marginalization — that reorients how to read contemporary Muslim characters’ exclusion.
• QUESTION: If Islamophobia operates by marginality rather than explicit denial, what formal devices stage that relegation in Hamid’s and Naqvi’s novels?