Books ReviewJanuary March 2008
Challenging the New Orientalism
Dissenting Essays on the ‘War Against Islam’
The essays in this book – written after 9-11 – challenge the new Orientalists at several levels. They show that their essentialist construction of an unchanging Islam, opposed to ‘Western’ values and incapable of adapting to the modern world, is misleading and dangerous. The not-so-hidden objective of the new Orientalism is to package the US and Israel’s imperialist thrust into the Islamic world as both a security imperative and a civilizing mission. Alam argues that the new Orientalist’s claim of clashing dichotomies between Islam and the West is based on a tendentious reading of the history of Islam and the West. While recognizing the political and economic failings of the Islamic world, Alam shows that these are legacies of two centuries of Western imperialism and are shared – to varying degrees – by all regions at the periphery of global capitalism.
Book Details
Author/s: M. Shahid Alam
Publisher: Islamic Publications International
ISBN PB: 1-889999-45-8
Pages: 272
Year of Publication: 2007
Price PB($): 19.95
