Cold War policies that Western powers drove cultivated Islamophobia globally.

Evidence

Islamophobia is not simply experienced in the cities and the countries of the West. It is fostered by historical policies that have often seen Muslim lands and their populations treated as expedients, collateral damage in the pursuit of other struggles. Chapter 6 discusses how both Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows are concerned to reconnect modern readers with that longer history. They tell of the globalization of conflict in the Cold War as the United States encouraged international Islamist extremism in the fight against communism in Afghanistan and elsewhere and consider globalization’s impact on the conduct of post-9/11 campaigns. In the process, these global novels by two Pakistani writers puncture Western complacency and superiority, crossing space and time to thread together characters separated by cultures and continents. Yet in this important project they are sometimes hampered by the same commonplaces of liberal universalism that shadow those less sympathetic accounts we have seen. “Worlding” the contemporary novel about Muslims is one way to try to establish more equitable narrative space, but it is still fraught with dangers. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 69

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the Cold War history in Aslam and Shamsie’s novels — relevant background for the reader’s own hinge work with Hamid and Naqvi, who share the same Pakistani-global vantage point. — connects to: Key Islamophobic organizations trace their lineage to Cold War-era neocons; Islam replaced communism as the West’s designated global enemy threat