Islamophobia in literature can reside in universalist reading practices rather than overt denunciation

Evidence

However, it is surely ironic in a novel such as The Unknown Terrorist, centrally concerned with the importance of having control over your own story, that the Muslim viewpoint is kept out of the picture entirely. Discomfort with the kind of story the Muslim subject might want to tell, if allowed to do so, appears deeply ingrained in the three thrillers we have looked at. It might even be possible to consider their prevarications an instance of latent Islamophobia: that unconscious prejudice against the kind of unpredictable personal coordinates the observant Muslim character might display. … In the end, the liberal thriller seems to have a strange, evasive relationship to confronting Islamophobia, dodging any engagement with the real racial-cultural coordinates of resurgent majoritarian nationalisms. Although scrupulously not claiming to speak on behalf of suffering Muslim victims in the war on terror, the liberal thriller writers I have examined here nonetheless reaffirm a culturalist bias in choosing not to imaginatively enter the space of the real victims of Islamophobia. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 379 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

As a Bangladeshi woman, Asma’s ability to traverse even the immigrant spaces of New York is severely circumscribed. She rarely ventures out from her home in Little Dhaka, as their part of Brooklyn is known, considering Manhattan “like another country” (71). Moreover, in a move that perhaps indicates that The Submission, despite its concern for stereotyping in the media, does not always escape stereotypes of its own, the restraints on Asma are depicted as cultural as well as Islamophobic. She begins as the archetypal oppressed Muslim woman, cowed by the patriarchal conventions of her community. Her tentative attempts to break free of tradition are crushed under the weight of convention and respectability—as when she attempts to rescue a neighbor from domestic abuse but finds her efforts rejected even by the victim, whose concern is primarily for reputation. Arin Keeble suggests that “the characterization of Asma that emerges,” despite this surface image, “is of a strong compassionate woman who won’t accept her husband being written out of history.” That may be so, but her ultimate fate reveals the combined weight of a paranoid host nation and an imposed collective responsibility to community. Her decision to speak up for Mo’s design at the public hearing brings plaudits from many Americans, who see her as acting against silencing oppression by Muslim males. Yet it also brings renewed scrutiny to her own residency status and that of fellow members of the Bangladeshi community in New York, many of whom are also irregular, and leads to an order for her expedited removal from the country. Her murder at the hands of an unknown knifeman—Is he a right-wing extremist or an outraged Bangladeshi community member?—takes place in the full glare of the nation’s media, for whom she has become a cause célèbre. In Waldman’s novel, there is no question but that those most directly at risk from hatred and Islamophobia will always pay the highest price. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 292 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim
• XREF: connects to: Muslim-authored novels are read as collective representative documents rather than individual explorations — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 510; Liberal reading habits themselves can fabricate Muslim difference; Liberal humanist fiction erases Muslim difference by staging conversion through canonical English verse (+20 more)

Related

• A liberal-humanist stance toward novels can itself smuggle in Islamophobic assumptions (similarity 0.92)
• Novels encode their stance on Islamic identity through form as much as content. (similarity 0.90)
• A novel contesting Islamophobia can still quietly reinforce liberal-manichean binaries in its characterization. (similarity 0.89)
• Refusing to narrate Muslim experience can itself constitute latent Islamophobia (similarity 0.87)
• Fiction can reinforce racial stereotypes even while nominally condemning extremism (similarity 0.86)
• A novel can undermine its own polyphonic argument by monolithically portraying Muslims. (similarity 0.86)
• Liberal thrillers can reinforce Islamophobia by refusing to narrate Muslim interiority (similarity 0.86)
• Omniscient narration can preempt paranoid misreadings of a Muslim character (similarity 0.85)
• Evenhanded novelistic treatment can falsely equate anti-Islamophobia activists with Islamophobes (similarity 0.85)
• Even distinguished literary novelists voice crude anti-Muslim prejudice (similarity 0.84)
• Islamophobia includes a latent assumption of Muslim cultural inferiority to the secular West. (similarity 0.83)
• Historical Islamophobia involves conflicting images, positionality, and intercultural borrowing. (similarity 0.82)
• A novel can expose stereotypes yet trap its own character within them (similarity 0.82)
• Anti-Islamophobic novels can still reproduce the stereotype of the oppressed Muslim woman (similarity 0.82)
• Liberal novels on Islamophobia center non-Muslim protagonists for reader identification (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• A liberal-humanist stance toward novels can itself smuggle in Islamophobic assumptions #expands (0.75)
• Refusing to narrate Muslim experience can itself constitute latent Islamophobia #corroborates (0.70) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 379
• Anti-Islamophobic novels can still reproduce the stereotype of the oppressed Muslim woman #expands (0.65) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 292