Making the British Muslim

Tracing representations of the Rushdie affair from 1989 to 2009, this study establishes a genealogy of how British Muslims appeared on the public scene and how an imaginary and politics of this subject position developed. The book combines innovative approaches in the theory of representation with close readings and rhetorical analysis of newspaper debates, novels, film, autobiography and political publications. It establishes that the figure of the British Muslim encapsulated the identity politics of a minority group just as much as the identity politics of Great Britain, and "the West" in general in the last twenty years. Falkenhayner argues that the imaginary that made the British Muslim was one of constant deferral of the acceptance of Islam in Europe as an intrinsic part of its self-image, and that dreams of purity on both the Islamic and the mainstream British sides of the divide denied an always already hybridized cultural reality.

Nicole Falkenhayner is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg, Germany.