Novels that aim for evenhandedness can leave the good Muslim-bad Muslim binary intact

Evidence

Yet despite—or perhaps because of—this urge to measure and judge warring positions against one another, The Submission ends up falling into the classic liberal trap of seeing both sides of an argument but being unable to accept the necessity of choosing between them. For instance, the text’s urge to recuperate its Muslim characters onto the “good Muslim” side of the “good Muslim/bad Muslim” balance sheet merely leaves the criterion in place. There is never any chance that Mo will turn out to be a “bad Muslim” in these terms, so the book’s much-vaunted ambivalence is slightly bogus. Although it aims to get beyond these categories, its deployment of representative types does not, in the end, challenge conventions of framing. It is more successful in understanding Mo’s intransigence and hostility as a piece of defensive self-stereotyping and a (perhaps necessary) tactical betrayal of his better judgment. Yet the very fact that Mo is brought to explain at all—after such determined resistance—indicates a degree of uncertainty about where the reader’s sympathies may be heading. The explanation seems slightly out of character and more like part of a deliberate liberal softening by Waldman to make Mo more “acceptable” to us by diluting the enigma. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 294

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘good Muslim-bad Muslim balance sheet’ as a framing convention that mere ambivalence does not dismantle — the reader’s central diagnostic tool.
• XREF: Directly gives the reader the claimed sharpest tool for distinguishing a novel that contests Islamophobia from one that quietly reinforces it — apply to Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Naqvi’s Home Boy.
• SEED: Article angle: ‘the liberal trap of evenhandedness’ as a distinct failure mode in post-9/11 fiction, contrasted with novels that actually break the good./bad binary.

Related

• A novel’s ambivalence can quietly reinforce the very stereotypes it claims to contest (similarity 0.93)
• Ambivalence that never risks making a Muslim character bad is just liberal evasion. (similarity 0.88)
• Novels encode their stance on Islamic identity through form as much as content. (similarity 0.84)
• Novels contest Islamophobia by foregrounding characters’ internal divisions (similarity 0.84)
• A novel contesting Islamophobia can still quietly reinforce liberal-manichean binaries in its characterization. (similarity 0.84)
• A liberal-humanist stance toward novels can itself smuggle in Islamophobic assumptions (similarity 0.83)
• Contesting Islamophobia in fiction requires defamiliarizing narrative form, not merely invoking empathy. (similarity 0.83)
• Novels contesting Islamophobia can still recruit the observant-versus-secular binary that sustains it. (similarity 0.82)
• Novels can reproduce or contest Islamophobia irrespective of authorial intent through formal features (similarity 0.82)
• Anti-Islamophobia novels can themselves profit from trading in Muslim stereotypes. (similarity 0.82)
• The novel’s formal ambiguities can contest Islamophobic assumptions even in complicit texts (similarity 0.82)
• Liberal novels often center non-Muslim protagonists in Islamophobia stories (similarity 0.81)
• A novel can expose stereotypes yet trap its own character within them (similarity 0.81)
• The Forsterian stance fails to balance personal and political trauma in Islamophobia fiction (similarity 0.81)
• Even distinguished literary novelists voice crude anti-Muslim prejudice (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Evenhanded novelistic treatment can falsely equate anti-Islamophobia activists with Islamophobes #expands (0.85) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 295
• A novel can undermine its own polyphonic argument by monolithically portraying Muslims. #expands (0.80) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 179
• A novel can expose stereotypes yet trap its own character within them #expands (0.75) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 357