The capacity for symbolic textual reading functions as a covert secularist test of belonging

Evidence

Saba Mahmood has gone so far as to claim that the tendency to read all texts, including sacred ones, as symbolic systems rather than divine truth is the key difference between Christianity and Islam, creating a “normative secularity” against which Muslims—with their inability to put sufficient critical distance between themselves and their sacred text—are weighed in the balance and found wanting. For her, secular antipathy is fortified by “a certain commitment to the poetic resources of the Judeo-Christian tradition—evident in a literary and aesthetic sensibility.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 91

Categorization

• DEFINE: Mahmood’s ‘normative secularity’ names the hidden standard by which Muslims are judged wanting.
• XREF: Directly productive for reading Hamid’s and Naqvi’s protagonists who inhabit secular literary space yet are rendered suspects — the secular-symbolic reader vs. devout Muslim binary recurs.
• QUESTION: Whether Naqvi’s narrator’s self-ironizing, secular, literary voice is itself performing the ‘critical distance’ that Mahmood says Muslims are accused of lacking — and whether the novel knows it.