Secular and sacred narrative traditions interpenetrate and never diverged

Evidence

Quite apart from the constant mutual influence of European and Muslim narrative traditions via the trade routes of southern Europe, North Africa, and Sicily, attentive reading of the English novel alone reveals that religiously derived moral preoccupations are continuous but come to be internalized in formal and metaphorical conventions and choices. In reiterating the implication that the West exclusively is characterized by modernity, pluralism, and enlightenment, literary readings also legitimize the conditions underpinning the false construction of Islam as inevitably at odds with Western ways of seeing. … The postsecular turn in criticism might be welcome when it recognizes the historical connectedness of the secular and the sacred over time and across cultures, but in its more antisecular guise it tends merely to recapitulate the notion of a materialist-individualist West and a spiritual-collectivist East in ways that ignore historical cross-fertilization. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 30

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s earlier work on cross-cultural moral panics (ADDENDUM-adjacent theme) and offers a vocabulary for arguing Hamid’s novel embeds religious moral structure within realist form. — connects to: The structure of erotomania mirrors the structure of mystical devotion — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1902
• SEED: Angles an article: reading The Reluctant Fundamentalist as continuous with English religious-moral novelistic convention, contesting the secular/religious binary.