Liberal novels on Islamophobia center non-Muslim protagonists for reader identification

Evidence

The Unknown Terrorist is certainly dogged in its pursuit of media manipulation and its human consequences. However, as I argue, Flanagan’s approach also points up some of the shortcomings in the liberal novel’s treatment of Islamophobia: limitations we can also see in the Le Carré and Fesperman novels. These limitations have to do with the fact that the characters who experience discrimination and exclusion most directly or toward whom our emotional investment is directed tend not to be Muslim. Setting aside real-world inequalities, these novels tacitly assume that the reader will more readily identify with the quandaries of protagonists who share a known, familiar cultural orientation. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 355

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to whether The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s Changez (a Muslim narrator) evades this liberal-novel limitation that Flanagan, Le Carré, and Fesperman fall into.
• QUESTION: Does Hamid’s choice of a Muslim first-person narrator fundamentally escape the ‘emotional investment directed away from Muslims’ problem, or does it create its own readerly distance?