Readable Bodies: Surveillance, Islamophobia, and the Muslim Embodiment in Post-9/11 Fiction

Abstract

               Post-9/11 literary criticism has largely focused on themes of terrorism, identity, and cultural conflict; however, comparatively little attention has been paid to the ways in which the Muslim body itself functions as a narrative technology of surveillance. This article asks how post-9/11 fiction transforms Muslim bodies into visible, legible, and inherently suspect figures within regimes of security and control. Through a critical reading of John le Carré’s A Most Wanted Man and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the article demonstrates how bodily markers such as accent, beard, posture, and comportment become sites through which suspicion is produced and surveillance is normalised. In A Most Wanted Man, Muslim refugee bodies are continuously monitored, interpreted, and classified through bureaucratic and intelligence frameworks, merging administrative surveillance with racialised perception. In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, the Muslim subject internalises the surveillant gaze, revealing how visibility itself becomes a mode of self-policing. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concepts of surveillance and biopolitics, alongside Edward Said’s critique of Orientalist representation, the article argues that post-9/11 fiction participates in the cultural legitimation of Islamophobic security practices by rendering Muslim embodiment readable as risk.