Liberal novelists cast literature itself as a core Western value threatened by Islam

Evidence

Central among the tenets of this breed of liberal novelist is the value of the kind of artistic and literary endeavors that Islam, since the Rushdie affair, is said to be suspicious of. In particular, what gets rearticulated is a notion of a tradition of core cultural values that literature should be in the business of preserving, primary among them being pluralism and reason. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 82

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the creed of the ‘liberal novelist’ against political religion — the position McEwan and Amis occupy.
• XREF: Connects to Amis/McEwan positioning that the reader may set against Hamid and Naqvi’s more ambivalent literary stances.