ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that far from being a time when Britain was secure in its democratic identity by dint of having "won" the Cold War, 1989 was a time of great uncertainty, in which a new "foreign" other appeared to emerge for the first time: the British Muslim. It suggests that such understandings are a form of democracy promotion which asserts the value to liberal democracy of a free press in a public sphere unencumbered by censorship. This argument is heavily reliant on an understanding of earlier arguments about the repressive hypothesis of power and a division of public and private spheres. The chapter also shows that Muslims who supported banning or censoring Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses were accused of being foreign, undemocratic, misogynist and violent, and that these characterisations are difficult to sustain. On the contrary, the practices and institutions of liberal democracy were fully implicated in silencing certain forms of debate and objectifying women.
