Western curatorial nostalgia for tolerant Islam can itself be a form of symbolic burial

Evidence

Madeline Clements describes the curatorial tendency among the Western characters in Aslam’s novel, which stands in stark contrast to the heedless, proactive destructiveness of the Taliban. She says of Aslam that “his ‘museum’ fictions … may better be characterised as ‘mausoleum’ fictions: stately literary edifices in which the artefacts treasured by (largely European or Western-educated) curators of heterodox Islamic tradition are carefully interred, moribund symbols of an earlier time of tolerance for whose resurrection Aslam keeps ‘vigil,’ yet retains little hope” (Writing Islam from a South Asian Muslim Perspective: Rushdie, Hamid, Aslam, and Shamsie [Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016], 91). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 888

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the museum/mausoleum distinction as a critical vocabulary for reading depiction of Islam — exactly the kind of transferable term the reader seeks.
• XREF: The museum-as-mausoleum reading of Western curatorial attitudes toward Islam parallels the reader’s analysis of how The Reluctant Fundamentalist contests versus reinforces Islamophobia — Changez resists being curated as a token.
• SEED: Could frame an essay contrasting Hamid’s Changez (an actively speaking, self-authoring subject) with the museum/mausoleum fate Clements diagnoses in Aslam — who gets to curate the Muslim subject?