Liberal thrillers can reinforce Islamophobia by refusing to narrate Muslim interiority

Evidence

It could be objected that these liberal writers are simply behaving ethically in refusing to speak for and thus to an extent co-opt Muslim experience. 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. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 379

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘latent Islamophobia’ as unconscious prejudice surfacing through narrative choices, a term the reader can wield analytically.
• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s hinge task — the contesting vs. quietly-reinforcing distinction applies to Hamid and Naqvi, whose narrators do grant Muslim subjects structural interiority.