Class, ethnicity, Otherness, and (Indian) Post-Colonial literature are discussed in this article. It also looks at censorship and Islam, and the control of political opposition. "Rushdie could have gone on and on about how the rise of Islamic fundamentalism is in fact an historical reaction to imperialism - how, in fact, the hundreds of years of occidental colonialism and imperialism have smashed the social fabric of Muslim life to the extent that the social critique of religion as an instrument of social control is beyond the pale in most Islamic societies and the institutions of higher learning within it."