In the contemporary post-9/11 era, Islam has been conflated with terrorism in the popular imagination through the discursive rhetoric of radicalism, Jihadism and illegal violence. This study explores how selected fictional narratives by Western and Muslim authors participate and intervene in this reductive discursive framing. Setting up the categories of post-9/11 neo-Orientalist novel and post-9/11 counter-Orientalist novel, I explore the dual role of fictional narratives in both the reiteration of a regime of truth of radical Islamic terrorism and the strategic contestation and subversion of this rhetoric through the generation of alternative modes of knowledge and subjectivation. I investigate these thematic concerns through a close textual analysis of the selected fictional works in the light of Michel Foucault’s genealogical concepts of dispositif, power/knowledge, problematization and ethical practices of the self. The theoretical framework of this study is also shaped through the insights of Giorgio Agamben, Achilles Mbembe and Falguni Sheth on the contemporary expressions of power and those of Saba Mahmood, Karen Vintges, Neslihan Cevik and Inez Valdez regarding Muslim agency. The study concludes that strategies of racialization, gendering and sexualization play a pivotal role in the generation of objects and subjects of Islamic terrorism. This research highlights that the abnormal subjectivity of the Muslim monster-terrorist enables the post-9/11 neo-Orientalist novel to generate structures of cultural and psychological knowledge that support various forms of power. Qualitative analysis of selected Western and Muslim writers reveals that structures of historicization and politicization enable the post-9/11 counterOrientalist novel to subvert this neo-Orientalist framing of Islam and to reframe Muslim and Western subjectivities and actions through the lens of subaltern dissidence against imperial violence. This study finds that a group of post-9/11 counter-Orientalist novels also form structures of critical counter-knowledge and autonomous post-Islamist identities through the generation of a syncretic, postcolonial alternative Islamic modernity.