Rehana Ahmed has noted how this debate was throughout marked by fault lines of class, race, and religion as the culturally privileged author, Monica Ali, and her reviewers sought to invoke individual imaginative freedom against the collective outrage of those taken to be the book's subjects. She points out that “an absolute advocacy of individual rights obscures the social hierarchies which give some individuals more access to those rights than others[,] … [while the protestors' concerns were] in part rooted in their vulnerability as members of a minority racialised group with a history of poverty and exclusion.” She also makes the important observation that the difference between the Rushdie and Brick Lane controversies lies in the fact that the former was grounded in the assertion of a group religious identity, whereas the latter was concerned with local and cultural disrespect

XREF: Connects to broader postcolonial and critical race theory debates about liberal individualism versus collective identity.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 662