Arab Representations of the Occident

Abstract

In his Orientalism (Vintage Books: 1978), literature teacher and culturalcritic Edward Said claimed that the entire corpus of academic, literary, andartistic knowledge about the Orient in general and theMuslim world in particularthat the West had accumulated and shaped was built up solely toserve its desire to conquer, control, and subjugate the Orient. His thesis waswidely discussed and influenced the study of the Middle East and the attitudesof numerous scholars.According to Said, theWest depicts the Orientas stagnant, static, exotic, submissive, and retarded, in contrast to the supposedlyenlightened and superior West. Some thirty years after the furor caused by this book, Rasheed El-Enany’s Arab Representations of the Occident: East-West Encounters inArabic Fiction challenges Said’s theory, at least with respect toArabic literature.El-Enany claims that Said only presented the western perspective andignored the Oriental resistance to it. In response, he presents the East-Westencounter through his own eyes, those of anArab intellectual who was bornand raised in Cairo and moved to Great Britain in 1977 during his twenties ...