Secular critique cannot easily assimilate fiction that accepts rather than tests religious doctrine

Evidence

Whereas criticism is a practice—something we do to texts and societies—critique, according to Judith Butler, is “an inquiry into the conditions of possibility that make judgement possible.” If, as Asad suggests, secular critique has become a modern theology serviced by the academic humanities, especially literary criticism, this development would in part explain the difficulty criticism has in dealing with a novel such as Minaret, where the attitude to religious orthodoxy is accepting and not questioning and where doctrine is embodied in the pious subject herself and not played out and tested in the plot. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 494

Categorization

• DEFINE: Butler’s distinction between criticism (a practice on texts) and critique (an inquiry into the conditions making judgement possible) is the operative vocabulary here.
• XREF: This is exactly the hinge to The Reluctant Fundamentalist — a novel whose attitude toward faith and the American secular order are contested; Morey’s ‘accepting and not questioning’ vs ‘played out and tested’ gives a criterion to sort that novel. — connects to: Rational or moral correction from inside cannot touch Zionism’s founding religious claim — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 563; Conflating literary and religious canon distorts genuinely secular hybrid texts — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1148