Literature’s talismanic power in Islamophobia debates depends on its interpretive openness

Evidence

However, the peculiar reanimation of this much older way of thinking about literature after the Rushdie affair and again after 9/11 indicates that literature continues to hold what we might term talismanic potential, ready to be wheeled out whenever a decisive rebuke needs to be issued to those from other cultures who simply don’t understand how important it is. The talismanic potential of literature is dependent on its openness to being interpreted. … As it has been deployed in current debates, it is taken to stand in contrast to the “closed” sacred text of Islam. Asad revisits his comparative history of these ideas in his book Formations of the Secular to suggest that although interpretation of the Quran has always been open and shifting, there has been no equivalent of that nineteenth-century European tradition of “higher” criticism that drew so strongly on Enlightenment and German idealism to treat the Bible as a literary text open to being read in mythological and symbolic as well as literalist ways. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 87

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the concept of literature’s ‘talismanic potential’ as key analytical vocabulary for distinguishing contesting from reinforcing texts.
• XREF: The West-versus-‘closed’ Islam binary echoes through Hamid’s and Naqvi’s texts, and connects to the reader’s earlier work on Veil extremism and the ‘closed vs open’ culture binary.