Secular critique struggles with novels that affirm rather than question religious orthodoxy

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: Distinguishes criticism as a practice from critique as an inquiry into judgement’s conditions.
• XREF: Directly relevant to reading Aboulela alongside Naqvi/Hamid — the axis of affirming vs. testing religious doctrine. — connects to: Conflating literary and religious canon distorts genuinely secular hybrid texts — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 1148