The bourgeois novel was co-opted to universalize Western secular ‘human nature’

Evidence

As a predominantly middle-class form, the novel has been uniquely placed to chart such anxieties as well as to give them expression. Yet it has also been co-opted in a discussion of secularism that universalizes a particular idea of “human nature” corresponding to Western experience and social development. Talal Asad’s assertion that “religious toleration was a political means to a strong state power” after the seventeenth-century European wars of religion might confuse cause and effect; state power was the price to be paid for ensuring toleration and the advance of secularism rather than something already lurking in the shadows waiting for an appropriate vehicle. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 86

Categorization

• XREF: Asad’s toleration cause-and-effect reversal is a sharp analytic tool for reading how Naqvi and Hamid frame secularism versus faith — connects to the reader’s central hinge work.
• QUESTION: Whether Asad’s state-power claim or Morey’s reversal is right matters for how to frame Muslim characters’ secularism in argument.