The aim of all this is not so much to indicate a simple intercultural resemblance or to suggest that Afghanistan resembles the United States of 150 years earlier. Rather, it is to reveal how our perceptions of the Other are always fashioned with the cultural tools we have available to us.

XREF: Echoes Said's Orientalism and classic social constructionist accounts of how we perceive the Other.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 351