British Muslims were not always the central demonized minority, only later becoming so

Evidence

Although it is true that, as Rehana Ahmed has written, “the British Muslim has become a cipher for the excesses of multiculturalism,” it is important to understand that it was not always so. … In the post–Second World War era, South Asians, many of them Muslim, found jobs in Britain’s factories and textile mills, often in industrial cities such as Bradford, Birmingham, and Leicester. As Sukhdev Sandhu says, they “lived scattered and largely respectable lives … [and] were demonised far less than Caribbean immigrants, who were routinely depicted as drains on the taxpayer’s coffers and red-blooded menaces to society.” … At the same time, the permanent murmur of racial hostility from majority white society came to be reflected in the rise of Far Right groups such as the National Front and subsequently the British National Party and in successive pieces of government legislation from the 1950s through to the 1980s designed to stem the flow in immigration from the nonwhite former colonies into Britain. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 150

Categorization

• XREF: Provides essential historical grounding for reading how The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Home Boy engage a later, post-9/11 Islamophobia — the earlier South Asian migrant position contrasts usefully with Naqvi and Hamid’s protagonists.