Even some of the images have a familiar ring; James wrote to Edith Wharton of the war as a "crash of Civilisation" (quoted on 216). But Nafisi also speaks for James, too, making him acknowledge "Europe's depravity, it's fatigue with its own past," sounding for all the world like Donald Rumsfeld lambasting "Old Europe" for its skepticism about the new imperial realities of the early twenty-first century. This whole peculiar insertion makes sense only as a coded engagement with issues of courage and a sense of civilization under threat that form part of the patriotic rhetoric of the Bush era.

XREF: Connects literary criticism to contemporary political rhetoric, linking post-9/11 American discourse with readings of James and Wharton.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 238