The Black Album frames doubt against certainty as its central political binary

Evidence

However, whereas The Buddha of Suburbia, like the early Kureishi films, thrives on polymorphous mingling and the dismantling of conventions, The Black Album seems much more an exercise in rehearsing opposing positions in a freedom-versus-restraint binary. This is evident primarily in the decision to center the action on protests against a novel that, despite being unnamed, is clearly meant to be The Satanic Verses. Freedom is also mapped onto hedonism and sensual pleasure—visual (in video and film), auditory (in pop music), and sexual—whereas restraint emerges in notions of purity, religious zeal, and abstinence. Doubt, which frees one to dream and imagine, is preferable to the dry certainty claimed by the zealots: Deedee views them as dangerously “devoid of doubt” (110). Indeed, the main message of the novel is encapsulated by the need to “embrace uncertainty” (227). Despite a few somewhat tepid attempts to imagine the attractions of a religious outlook, the novel in the end makes secularism the key guarantor of individual liberty against the Riaz group’s censorious self-righteousness. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 171

Categorization

• XREF: The freedom-versus-restraint binary gives me a comparative lens: does Hamid’s Changez or Naqvi’s Changez operate on a similar binary, or do they complicate it more than Kureishi’s novel does?
• QUESTION: Morey frames The Black Album as rehearsing a binary rather than dissolving it. Worth checking how far Hamid’s and Naqvi’s protagonists embody doubt as an ethical stance versus how far they too quietly reify the secular-versus-religious frame.