The novel form carries three centuries of secular individualism shaping its possibilities

Evidence

In other words, Minaret appears to reveal the difficulty of attempting to move the secular individualist form of the novel back to its spiritual roots, to fill an art form etched by three hundred years of secular individualism with a sense of God as a real presence. The difficulty of this task is reflected in the novel’s interpretative crises and challenges and in the collision between its spiritual agenda and the banality of its chosen form. Even so, close analysis of some of the novel’s structuring themes and its overall shape reveals that it inherits traits characteristic of much older forms of storytelling that have their origins in a worldview with points of commonality between Islam and the European tradition. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 477

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the novel’s very form is secularly etched — that spiritual content collides with formal banality — is a dense, transferable instrument for judging how any religious fiction performs.
• DEFINE: Gives a vocabulary for naming why religious belief felt fake or flat in a realist novel — a form-content collision.
• XREF: Directly applicable to judging whether Naqvi’s and Hamid’s formal choices (or refusals) contest or reinforce readings of Muslim experience.