Islamophobia in Amis and McEwan is rooted in aesthetics as much as politics.

Evidence

The notion of reasonable Islamophobia has gained traction through repetition. One of its earliest post-9/11 formulations comes in Martin Amis’s volume of essays The Second Plane, where he describes followers of militant Islam as “misologists” (haters of reason) and religious minds as irretrievably “dependent.” If, as Asad concludes, Islamophobia is rooted in paranoia, denoting “a range of affective states, including horror, loathing and nausea,” and if paranoia is a condition particularly associated with modernist aesthetics, we can perhaps see the anti-Muslim paranoia that sometimes appears to surface, directly or indirectly, in Amis and McEwan as rooted in aesthetics as much as in politics. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 94

Categorization

• XREF: Gives the reader a critical vocabulary for distinguishing novelistic style (modernist paranoia vs. contesting mode) — a transferable axis for Hamid and Naqvi claims.
• SEED: Angle: reading how a novel’s formal inheritance (realist plain style vs. modernist paranoia) predisposes whether it contests or reinforces Islamophobia.