ABSTRACT
The appropriation of the Gulf crisis from a global set of media images, reworked as a locally significant narrative, raises questions about the way in which diasporas fabulate their local experiences in a global idiom. In this chapter I consider the speeches made by British Pakistanis in Manchester in response to the Gulf crisis as an appropriation-and hence localization-of a global fable. Through this fable, I argue, Pakistanis constructed a powerful, ideologically grounded, allegory of their predicament as an enclaved Muslim community in the West, while simultaneously asserting their membership in a global diaspora.
