Huggan argues that in the exotic "authenticity is invariably manufactured to meet a set of ideological needs." It is judged according to certain criteria set by the dominant viewing culture, which include "the perceived need to recapture a sense of threatened cultural identity …; the desire to rejuvenate one culture by siphoning off the attributes of another; the repressed wish to save face, or salve conscience, by praising a culture … that one has previously insulted; and so on." … However, none of these explanations quite captures the resonance of the exotic gaze when focused on the Islamic world more broadly. Here, rather than rejuvenation, belated praise, or the comforting lure of food or fabrics, the exotic is affected directly by politics. With Muslim misery memoirs, the Western publishing industry and its readers are attracted to books that claim to give us the inside story on Muslim cultures because they seem to offer a handle on what is both alien and threatening. The artifacts of "soft" exotic culture, such as local cuisine and folk practices, are packaged attractively to emphasize a common yet culturally unfamiliar humanity, but they are always also either implicitly or explicitly contrasted with the repressive surrounding dominant political, social, and religious formation of Islam. In the modern "global village," items from India, the Caribbean, and parts of Africa lend themselves quite readily to conventional exotic commodification. For Muslim societies, in contrast, the Western desire to claim and domesticate them remains but is always marked by an Islamophobic estrangement that gives that desire a certain urgency and aligns it with existing discourses of civilizational threat.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 243