In Two Years Eight Months & Twenty-Eight Nights (2015), a fantasy set in the future, Salman Rushdie imagines a war between reason and religion – and uses hyperbolic irony to criticise a fundamentalist interpretation of both. Tinged by this irony, the novel’s elucidation of terrorism mimics – by relying on stereotypes itself – the often-reductive representation not just of Islamist terrorism, but of the Islamicate Other more generally. In this – albeit ironic – reliance on negative framings of the Islamicate Other, the text’s representational approach is no exception on the Western literary market. In fact, and as this book argues, with few exceptions, the dependence on reductive sexualised and securitised modes of representing the Islamicate Other can frequently be found even in literature marketed as open-minded and cosmopolitan; in contrast, fundamental reframings in different contexts of meaning are much rarer.

What holds true for the literary market is a phenomenon which by far transcends the realm of fiction. Despite the existence of, for instance journalistic, attempts to provide a more nuanced picture, negative framings of the Islamicate Other mostly attract greater attention. From Donald Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’ to Renaud Camus’ Great Replacement theory to hate speech against alleged ‘rapefugees’: since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the vilification of the Islamicate Other as a threat to the West has sharply intensified in public discourse.