Liberal thrillers about Islamophobia center white victims, domesticating Muslim suffering.

Evidence

Yet in the end the absence of the Muslim object of prejudicial treatment is somewhat unsettling. Flanagan’s point is that anyone, black or white, Muslim or non-Muslim, could become the object of state violence and expulsion. But the fact that this scenario plays out through the experience of a white Australian woman—albeit working class and disenfranchised—somehow implies a humanistic leveling at the cost of the specifics of cultural experience. As in A Most Wanted Man, where the more fully rounded characters are the non-Muslim Europeans, and in The Warlord’s Son, with its focus on the American journalist Skelly, so in Flanagan’s novel our concern is invited for the wronged non-Muslim caught in the fallout of the war on terror. In each case, the Sacrifice—he or she who suffers the effects of neoimperialism and racism—tends to be a white Westerner. Thus, it seems, the limitation of the liberal thriller is set by a racialized hierarchy of sympathy in which those characters with whom we can be most readily expected to identify are those who are most like “ourselves.” The bigger question, then, is whether these novels in some sense culturally appropriate the experience of Muslim suffering, domesticating it for the delectation of a presumed white, non-Muslim readership. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 377

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘racialized hierarchy of sympathy’ and cultural-appropriation question bears directly on whether Hamid’s and Naqvi’s choice to center Muslim protagonists rather than white ones is what lets their novels contest rather than reinforce Islamophobia.
• SEED: Directly feeds the reader’s thesis: contrast the white ‘Sacrifice’ of Morey’s liberal thrillers with Hamid and Naqvi’s Muslim-centered narration as the decisive move that flips a narrative from reinforcing to contesting.