[nopardons]

And just WHY would she have done THAT, in the early 1980s, when Muslims were hardly EVER talked about and weren't much of a blip on Canadian radar?

You haven't read the book, you haven't seen the movie made of it, I doubt that you even heard of Margaret Atwood, let alone read anything she has ever written, before this thread appeared. LOL

Look, my point is, you should have stopped digging long ago, but instead, you just keep on digging!

Have you EVER even read any dystopian sci-fi/fantasy fiction?

You want to tie Islamic stuff to something from that genre? Then read DUNE...which was published in 1965 long, long, looooooooooooooooooooong before there was al Qaeda, ISIS, terrorist plots in this country!

Better still....read BRAVE NEW WORLD, if you want to be surprised by something; though truthfully, though I enjoyed that book at 14, when I reread it many decades later, it bored me to tears.

[A_perfect_lady]

Oh, I don't know. The 1972 Munich attack on the Israeli athletes, and the two attacks in 1983 in Lebanon certainly made plenty of people aware of Islam. Not to mention the dramatic changes in Iran after the fall of the Shah and the rise of the Ayatollah. The hostages they took while Carter was in office. If Atwood wasn't aware of Islam by 1985, she was a moron.

But my point is only that Atwood's story could very easily be placed in the Islamic world, and it would be ... well ... pretty accurate. But instead she placed it in the Christian world, where it is wildly unlikely to happen.