The novel form cannot be reduced to a positive or negative message.

Evidence

The Satanic Verses was the spark that ignited a sense of injustice among Muslims that led to, among other things, the assertion of a collective British Muslim identity in the years that followed. And, of course, Rushdie continues to be the bête-noir for many Muslims, who believe his supposed insults to their religion and their prophet to be unforgivable. However, we should be wary of seeing all literary and cultural perspectives that are critical of Islam as “Islamophobic.” Blanket denunciations are unhelpful because they tend to close down debate and are insufficiently attentive to the status of many of these texts as creative products of art and imagination—something that makes them prone to the same forces of hesitation and inconsistency that always animate those activities. In particular, the novel—with the modes of address it employs and with its unique purchase on the imagination of a reader who is required to create in his or her mind a world and thereafter to populate it—cannot be reduced to pure “message,” whether positive or negative. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 22

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the key distinction between texts critical of Islam and genuinely Islamophobic texts — the hinge concept for the whole chapter.
• XREF: Directly relevant to reading The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Home Boy — both are novels that resist reduction to pure message.