Eventalizing the British Muslim

Abstract

In a further spin, or drawing the next side of the polyhedron that can be established by eventalizing the Rushdie affair, I will observe how the affair has been discursively embedded to point to public narratives of certain British cultural issues in recent years. Here we can ascertain eventalization templates, by which I mean the most often employed templates of meaning-making concerning the relevance of the Rushdie affair for British Muslims and British multiculturalism, as they have been established in recent years.¹ Each of these starts with a short review of one of the monographs published in the early 1990s as immediate reflections of the affair. In that sense, these monographs provide some of the first threads in which interpretation of the Rushdie affair as a metacultural event took place: Malise Ruthven’s A Satanic Affair (1990), neoconservative American political analyst Daniel Pipes’ The Rushdie Affair (1990) and A Legacy of Blasphemy (1990) by the cultural historian Richard Webster, also published in German translation as Erben des Hasses in 1992.