The secularization thesis fails to account for religious difference in fiction

Evidence

In this argument, I am largely following the secularization thesis as it has been applied to the English novel, with a full awareness that there is much more to be said about its nuances and sometimes outright contradictions as it plays out in slippery literary texts. Indeed, my point is to indicate the inadequacy of this thesis to a proper understanding of literary texts such as Minaret and to suggest a divergence between literary practice and critical modes of apprehending that practice when it comes to certain kinds of cultural difference. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 956

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s hinge work: this is the critical vocabulary for distinguishing when literary practice (Aboulela’s Minaret) escapes the secularist critical lens that would flatten it. Connects to how Hamid and Naqvi’s novels might likewise resist secularizing readings. — connects to: As secularization progresses, the novel’s subjective heroes become arbitrary grotesques — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 361
• DEFINE: Names the ‘secularization thesis’ as applied to the English novel — a framework the reader needs as a foil for reading pious Muslim fiction.