Rushdie’s English and prestige were used against British Muslim immigrants

Evidence

That it was written in English, by a writer of Muslim origin with immense prestige in the Western countries, and was made available by powerful Western publishing industries to the international media and the British state, to be used against the immigrant communities inside Britain as well as for certain kinds of representations of Muslim people in the imperialist countries generally – all that, of course, greatly complicated the issue of the heresy. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 410

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that a literary work circulated by the state was weaponized against a domestic minority parallels analysis of how colonial and imperial structures operationalize culture, echoing the law-merchant and social-capital material on how institutions and structures shape outcomes.

Related

• Said’s Rushdie defense contradicted his own critique of representation (similarity 0.84)