Liberal calls to educate the excluded may aim at pacification rather than empowerment

Evidence

The therapeutic qualities of Arnold’s work suggest that the excluded may be transformed by exposure to art and literature, although—as with Arnold and his fellow nineteenth-century liberals—there is always some doubt as to whether the aim is to empower or to pacify them. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 117

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to reading the redemptive trajectory and ‘convert’ arc in both Naqvi and Hamid — whether education/assimilation offered to outsiders pacifies rather than empowers them.
• SEED: The core critical question for the reader’s essay: does a novel’s gesture of inclusion (education, art, love) tame its Muslim outsider into docility instead of genuinely empowering them?