Refusing to narrate Muslim experience can itself constitute latent Islamophobia

Evidence

However, it is surely ironic in a novel such as The Unknown Terrorist, centrally concerned with the importance of having control over your own story, that the Muslim viewpoint is kept out of the picture entirely. Discomfort with the kind of story the Muslim subject might want to tell, if allowed to do so, appears deeply ingrained in the three thrillers we have looked at. It might even be possible to consider their prevarications an instance of latent Islamophobia: that unconscious prejudice against the kind of unpredictable personal coordinates the observant Muslim character might display. … In the end, the liberal thriller seems to have a strange, evasive relationship to confronting Islamophobia, dodging any engagement with the real racial-cultural coordinates of resurgent majoritarian nationalisms. Although scrupulously not claiming to speak on behalf of suffering Muslim victims in the war on terror, the liberal thriller writers I have examined here nonetheless reaffirm a culturalist bias in choosing not to imaginatively enter the space of the real victims of Islamophobia. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 379

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to discriminating contesting vs. quietly reinforcing in Hamid and Naqvi — the ‘silence as complicity’ reading of liberal thrillers gives the reader a test for whether their two novels escape the same evasive gesture. — connects to: Formal ambiguities can contest Islamophobia even in sympathetic texts; Islamophobia includes a latent assumption of Muslim cultural inferiority to the secular West.; Literature resists Islamophobic universalism by structuring feeling and imagining alternative experiences (+15 more)
• SEED: Angle for an essay: ‘the ethics of imaginative refusal’ — when does a writer’s respectful silence about the oppressed function as a form of collusion with the majoritarian gaze, and where does Hamid’s or Naqvi’s willingness to enter that space mark the difference?
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 379

Broader Connections

• Islamophobia is refusing Muslims a role in building national identity #expands (0.55)
• Islamophobia is systemic and institutionalized, not merely individual prejudice #expands (0.50) — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 641