Like many writers of non-western backgrounds in the west, Rushdie had suffered the ambiguous fate of being hastily appointed as a representative and spokesperson of India, South Asia, the "third world", multiculturalism, the immigrant condition – whatever seemed alien and incomprehensible to the white majority. In reality, there was little in common between Rushdie, an atheistic, Cambridge-educated upper-class intellectual from Bombay, and the devout guest-worker from Anatolia (representative of the mostly working-class Muslims of rural origins who had been imported to service Europe's post-war economies), or the Pakistani trade unionist chased out by the torturers of Zia ul-Haq, the CIA-backed radical Islamist who had spent most of the 1980s facilitating an anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan.
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