Sympathy for individual migrants does not protect fiction from flat portrayals of Muslim communities

Evidence

Geoffrey Nash says of writers such as Rushdie, Kureishi, and Ali that while their sympathies “may be with the individual migrant (a Shahid in The Black Album or a Nazneen in Brick Lane) these [sympathies] usually do not extend to migrant communities, and their fiction more often than not incorporates two-dimensional versions of Islam and Muslim fundamentalists” (Writing Muslim Identity [London: Continuum, 2012], 12). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 680

Categorization

• XREF: This is precisely the tool needed for reading Changez in Naqvi’s Home Boy versus the broader community — whether sympathetic protagonists still traffic in two-dimensional Islam.
• DEFINE: Defines a critical distinction: contesting Islamophobia at the level of the sympathetic protagonist versus replicating it at the level of community depiction.