Arab Representations of the Occident

Abstract

In his Orientalism (Vintage Books: 1978), literature teacher and cultural critic Edward Said claimed that the entire corpus of academic, literary, and artistic knowledge about the Orient in general and theMuslim world in particular that the West had accumulated and shaped was built up solely to serve its desire to conquer, control, and subjugate the Orient. His thesis was widely discussed and influenced the study of the Middle East and the attitudes of numerous scholars.According to Said, theWest depicts the Orient as stagnant, static, exotic, submissive, and retarded, in contrast to the supposedly enlightened 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 in Arabic Fiction challenges Said’s theory, at least with respect toArabic literature. El-Enany claims that Said only presented the western perspective and ignored the Oriental resistance to it. In response, he presents the East-West encounter through his own eyes, those of anArab intellectual who was born and raised in Cairo and moved to Great Britain in 1977 during his twenties ...