Islamist identity is misread when reduced to Arab nationalist sentiment

Evidence

This tension between the individual and the collective recurs in the question of how Islam relates to identity. At one point, Tamer and Najwa directly discuss their sense of identity. Rejecting any notion of being Western, they both settle on “Muslim” as the identity marker they are most comfortable with—in contrast to Lamya, whom Tamer believes considers herself Arab (110). This is a crucial distinction and one remarked upon in Saba Mahmood’s analysis of Egyptian Muslim women when she notes the Western critical tendency to misread Islamist movements as “a recoding of [Arab] nationalist sentiment in religious idioms.” Both Mahmood and Aboulela reject this as an inaccurate understanding of the role of Islam as an all-encompassing internationalist solidarity; in Minaret, Najwa remarks on the many nations represented in the weekly Quran classes she attends at her local mosque. In pitting the religious against the national and the personal against the political, the novel clearly seeks to endorse the former in each case. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 485

Categorization

• XREF: Crucial analytic distinction — Mahmood/Mahmoud’s correction of nationalist misreading is the same move the reader needs to protect Hamid and Naqvi from being flattened into hyphenated-nationalist readings. — connects to: Hamas discourse measurably shifted from religious to nationalist vocabulary by 2012 — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 2433; Islamist groups are locally shaped and resist homogenizing categorization
• QUESTION: Does either Hamid or Naqvi stage identity as choosing between Muslim and hyphenated-nationalist markers like Minaret does? Worth checking which novels present such explicit identity-label scenes.