Kureishi framed the Rushdie affair as a freedom-of-speech battle that became canonical

Evidence

Kureishi’s account of the fault lines exposed by the Rushdie affair has become, for now at least, the canonical view of recent history as the anxious gaze of politicians and the media has fallen on the West’s Muslim populations, on the lookout for signs of radicalization. This gaze became obsessive after the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11, 2001, and the West’s chosen response to them. As British Muslims came under increased scrutiny, so Kureishi’s texts from the previous decade—such as his short story “My Son the Fanatic” (later made into a film) and novel The Black Album, both of which explored the phenomenon of Muslim extremism among the community in Britain—came to seem particularly prescient. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 146

Categorization

• DEFINE: Labels Kureishi’s framing of the Rushdie affair as ‘the canonical view of recent history’ — a useful vocabulary term for how Islamophobic readings become entrenched.
• XREF: Directly relevant to Reluctant Fundamentalist — post-9/11 scrutiny of Muslims as the condition under which Hamid writes.