Muslim-working class tensions disguise resource struggles dressed as culture

Evidence

It is for this reason that the move from community to economic autonomy seen in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane is so indicative. Nazneen’s final success is in realizing a role as a proactive capitalist agent (a “striver” instead of a “skiver” in popular parlance). I have suggested that this ending inscribes a “coming in” from misguided communalist values to individual ones lauded and rewarded by the state. However, if we read this ending against its utopian grain—considering the solidarities broken or left behind on Nazneen’s journey—we can see a refutation of the kinds of unity capable of at least making a dent in the smooth functioning of neoliberal capitalism. Hence, the importance of returning to center stage the fact that tensions between the white working class and Muslims—although dressed up as cultural—are in fact a struggle for shrinking resources in the increasingly privatized modern nation, a struggle infamously enshrined in the “immigrants taking our jobs” narrative. It is in politicians’ interest to disguise this struggle by projecting it as being about incompatible values. Therefore, one aim of this book is to reiterate a commonality of interest among those who have been victims of neoliberalism’s global advance and to suggest that stoking the fear of Muslims is the price we pay for extending the global reign of liberal values, understood as a panoply of wide-ranging invocations of “freedom,” privileged among which are individual autonomy and our supposed choice as actors in so-called free markets. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 514

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘striver vs skiver’ and culture-disguising-class analysis gives the reader a lens for whether Hamid and Naqvi’s protagonists contest or reproduce this valorized autonomy framing.
• SEED: A usable critical move: test whether Hamid and Naqvi’s Muslim protagonists end as aspirational capitalist subjects — and whether that ending contests or quietly reinforces Islamophobic assumptions about communal values.