Naqvi’s novel contests Islamophobia by exposing national security discourse as state crime

Evidence

National security discourse permits state crimes. Lean describes the roundup of Pakistani-origin Muslims after 9/11 on feeble pretexts such as having “erratic schedules,” and the harsh treatment they endured. Chuck is hooded and beaten up in the detention center, and when he demands to make a phone call with the declaration, “I know my rights,” he is abruptly reminded: “You aren’t American!… You got no fucking rights ” (107). The racism resurgent after 9/11 is also evident in the interrogation scene. An inquisitor dubbed “Grizzly” pursues a line of questioning based on the presumption that Chuck, as someone of Muslim background, has some sort of “authentic” inside knowledge about terrorism: “he figured I would have special insight into the phenomenon—knowledge of the relevant fatwa, or some verse in the Koran—just as a black man, any black man, should be privy to black-on-black violence or the allure of a forty ounce” (115). … And later, much later, the pendulum would swing back, and everybody would celebrate progress, the storied tradition of accommodation, on TV talk shows and posters in middle schools” (121). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 305

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to Home Boy (Naqvi) — the second novel the reader is analyzing. Grizzly’s assumption of ‘authentic’ inside knowledge maps onto one axis of the contesting-vs-reinforcing distinction.
• SEED: The Grizzly interrogator presumption — that minority status grants authentic inside knowledge of deviance — is a sharp tool for comparing how Hamid and Naqvi handle the burden of representing ‘the Muslim.’