Nazneen’s challenge to religious usury enables her neoliberal economic emancipation

Evidence

If Mrs. Islam, the moneylender with whom Nazneen and her husband become embroiled earlier, represents both the “bad,” usurious face of business-and, in her name, the censorious and restrictive face of religion-then Nazneen’s confrontation with her, during which she accuses the old woman of charging riba, or interest, marks the moment when Nazneen finally shakes off her bondage to community traditions and conservative religious practice. As Stephen Morton has put it, “Nazneen’s challenge to Mrs Islam is the condition of possibility for both her economic sovereignty and for Nazneen to emerge as the heroic female individual of the neoliberal bildungsroman” (“Multicultural Neoliberalism, Global Textiles, and the Making of the Indebted Female Entrepreneur in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane,” in Amina Yaqin, Peter Morey, and Asmaa Soliman, eds. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 695

Categorization

• XREF: Directly echoes the reader’s own concern: how a Muslim woman’s agency is narratively routed through an embrace of neoliberal individualist norms — the same dynamic at play in Naqvi’s characters’ compromises.
• QUESTION: Is ‘heroic female individual of the neoliberal bildungsroman’ a genuinely liberatory framing, or quiet reinforcement of Western individualist Islamophobia? Worth pursuing in the reader’s own chapter.