Historical Islamophobia involves conflicting images, positionality, and intercultural borrowing.

Evidence

David Damrosch suggests that world literature is “not a canon of texts but a mode of reading: a form of detached engagement with the world beyond our own place and time.” Theo D’haen glosses this definition in terms of the task of the world literary critic, which is “to bring out the strangeness of the work[,] … thus offering a new and different perspective … and in the process also disengaging the reader or student from his unconscious immersion in his own culture.” I would argue that this active idea of defamiliarization can profitably be brought to bear on Aslam’s novel The Wasted Vigil, which in its own right encourages a sense of overlapping histories and textualities. The novel is in essence concerned with “How stories travel—what mouths and minds they end up in” (25, emphasis in original). The house of the English Muslim convert Marcus Caldwell to which each of the main characters comes, is a “house of readers”: confronting all with the need to read each other’s experiences while also reading the tangled histories that have brought them there with all the attention and care they would lavish on one of the books suspended from the ceiling. Marcus observes, “Through stories we judge our actions before committing them” (87). This concern with listening to the stories of others is also reflected in the novel’s fluid form, shaped by the characters’ consciousnesses and memories, where multiple focalization and polyphony take us into the minds of, among others, Lara and Marcus; David Town, former CIA agent and gem dealer; Zameen, Marcus’s daughter, abducted in the 1980s and later killed; and the would-be suicide bomber Casa and his ideological opposite number, James Palantine of the U.S. Special Forces. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 397

Categorization

• DEFINE: Recasts world literature as ‘a mode of reading’ — defamiliarization — rather than a canon; a transferable frame for reading Hamid and Naqvi as contesting rather than reinforcing fear.
• XREF: Defamiliarization as critical reading tool connects to the reader’s hinge project of treating Hamid and Naqvi as evidence — ‘detached engagement’ names the analytic stance.