Thus far I have been referring to culture as the logic of practices by which a notion of unity is created. These practices depend on a performative sense of ourselves and of Others that has to be created and constantly reiterated. For example, the othering of Muslims as terrorists and irrational people requires certain mechanisms to allow it to spread and be internalized. Talal Asad writes of modernity as a project aimed at institutionalizing certain principles—"constitutionalism, moral autonomy, democracy, human rights, … consumerism, freedom of the market—and secularism. It employs proliferating technologies (of production, warfare, travel entertainment, medicine) that generate new experiences of space and time, of cruelty and health, of consumption and knowledge." Against each of these principles, "the Muslim" is positioned as aberration or threat. Such an undertaking involves the aesthetic realm, too—that other, narrower kind of "culture" usually taken to mean the arts, media, and sometimes science and often having class connotations. Literature, for all the claims made for its independence, is one of these technologies.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 80