Minaret’s communalist ending resists both communitarian and individualist romance resolutions

Evidence

In effect, Najwa’s decision cements a communalist rather than a communitarian or individualist resolution. A communitarian outcome would result in social (re)integration, as in the marriage resolution much favored in nineteenth-century fiction. An individualist one would look more like the typical modernist ending as famously described by Raymond Williams, involving “a man going away on his own, having extricated himself from a dominating situation and found himself in so doing.” By contrast, Minaret’s conclusion is communalist in that Najwa chooses to valorize one particular group—the Islamicly devout and observant—against a distinct other group—the profane and the unbelievers—rather than to recycle humanism’s usual accommodation with a bigger imaginative universe populated by those who are broadly sympathetic to an inclusive set of moral abstractions. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 506

Categorization

• DEFINE: Morey’s tripartite distinction — communalist vs. communitarian vs. individualist endings — gives the reader a precise critical vocabulary for classifying how fiction resolves (or refuses) its political commitments.
• QUESTION: Which category do Hamid and Naqvi endings land in? Likely worth testing the communalist/individualist lens against The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s and Home Boy’s conclusions.
• SEED: Promising essay angle: using Morey’s three-way typology of endings to compare how Islamophobia-era novels resolve their protagonists’ relation to community.