Work · Philosophy in the Islamic World
Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse
Essay in the journal Khamsin: Edward Said rightly exposed Orientalism as a style of domination, but by tracing it back to Homer he made it as timeless as the essences he criticised; those who answer it by asserting an unchanging Islamic or Arab essence reproduce Orientalism “in reverse”.
Introduction
Sadiq al-Azm published “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse” in 1981 in Khamsin, a journal of the Arab and Israeli left, three years after Edward Said’s Orientalism. The essay has two parts. The first, on Orientalism, accepts Said’s argument that Orientalist scholarship served imperial power, but objects that by tracing Orientalism back to Homer, Aeschylus and Dante, Said made it an unchanging essence of the West – the very kind of essentialism he criticised in Orientalism – and that he could not explain why Orientalist knowledge was often accurate or how Marx’s writings on India fit his scheme. The second part, on Orientalism in reverse, criticises Arab nationalists, Islamists and leftists who answered Western images with an Islamic or Arab essence of their own, for example by explaining the Iranian revolution as the expression of an unchanging Islamic spirit. The essay became one of the most cited critiques of Said in the Arab world.
Connections
Criticizes
- Orientalism1978 · Edward Said
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