Orientalism from Edward Said to Trump .. Explosion of "Islamophobia" in culture and politics

Imran Abdullah

"Orientalism" (1978) was the right book at the right time for the right author, looking at the roots of Western stereotypes about the mythical, irrational, and violent East of the backward, which confronts the rational, civilized civil West. Thanks to him, the Palestinian thinker Edward Said became the prominent literary theorist of his generation. The text is the difference that analyzes the post-colonial Western world.

Said Said that "Orientalism" since the late eighteenth century form a Western approach to control the East, stressing that the study of the East by the Westerners is a biased study driven by colonial purposes and views of the past and the inferior look of the peoples of the East, no matter what they tried to appear scientific and objective.

But Said, who died in September 2003, did not experience all the post-classical transformations of European Orientalism, especially after Arabs and Islam were no longer covered by an attempt at knowledge and understanding, but hatred, hatred and hatred, according to Hamid Debashi, author of The Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Times of Terror.

In the middle of 2017, US President Donald Trump spoke to leaders of the Muslim world in Saudi Arabia in a paternalistic tone calling for them to take the lead in fighting "Islamic terrorism" "He said.

In a study of British media by Al Jazeera English, it was noted that the imbalance in the coverage of Muslim news in the media contributes greatly to the "hostility" and hatred of Islam in the Western political discourse, In the United States, the phenomenon appears to be more hostile. Orientalist rhetoric such as that expressed by Bernard Lewis contains an enormous mix between Islam and terrorism.

The new orientalism
In his new book, "Islamophobia: How New Orientalism Illustrates Arabs and Muslims," ​​Fakhri Saleh Saleh al-Khattab offers examples of writers such as Adib Nobel, Vidiyar Surajprasad, and the two most famous Americans in Islamic world studies, Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington.

Saleh considers that these writers and their ilk are the result of the Western strategic need to build a new enemy, an ideological image, not a scientific one.

Saleh sees the different circumstance, context and contemporary moment that contributed to the transformations of orientalism and serves the purposes of the sole pole in the American empire, which is working to consolidate its hegemony and political and economic domination around the world.

Thus, the new orientalism seems to be devoid of theoretical knowledge and real literary studies; it focuses on the strategic interests of the empire, and the populism and the rise of the right in the transformation of American Orientalism from twentieth-century theoretical traditions.

The dramatic shift from European Orientalism to American Orientalism has been evident since the 2016 US presidential election when Trump delivered a speech in Youngstown, Ohio, in which he said that the threat of radical Islam was similar to the great evils of the 20th century.

"We can not allow the hateful ideology of radical Islam - its persecution of women, homosexuals, children and non-believers - to exist or spread within our country," Trump said.

This view is rooted in the new radical Orientalist tradition, the confluence of radical violence and the critique of Islam itself, just as Trump's administration mixes violent and moderate Islamic groups.

The new orientalist discourse on media sources is based on the cognitive, linguistic and literary studies of the Middle East in the eighteenth century, and, as ancient Orientalism, enlightenment and urbanization were used to justify the colonial era, the new Orientalism is used to serve the "war on terror" regardless of the victims and the success of the strategy .

Aladdin
The American Council on American-Islamic Relations issued a press release asking critics and critics to recognize that "the myth of Aladdin as portrayed in the film aggravates racism, orientalism and hatred of Islam" , And called on the Council to address the ethnic and religious stereotypes enshrined in the new Disney film.

In his book Orientalism, Edward Said studied the literary and narrative texts used by Western writers (and still use them) to depict Asia and the Middle East in a mythical way as romantic, romantic and mystical worlds, mysterious or mystical lands, serving the colonial perspective of the region.

The new film is a consecration of this stereotypical stereotypical image of a princess who longs to escape a repressive culture of domination. Her ultimate goal is to obtain sufficient independence and love marriage instead of political interests. Her father appears to be a man easily fooled and manipulated. "On racist and sarcastic images, according to the American cultural magazine Aga Romano.

Said was interested in the study of the backgrounds of Orientalism cultural in the West, considering that it was able to "produce the East politically, socially, militarily, ideologically, scientifically and figuratively."

"Western culture has gained more power and identity by positioning itself as opposed to the East as an alternative," Said said. "Orientalism has become centralized and pervasive to the extent that it restricts Oriental thought and even those who write about the East even if they are not Western.

At the time of Trump, the European Right, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, Orientalism seems to have turned into a kind of Islamophobia and hatred of Muslims. This requires a kind of new reading of Edward Said's work, which radically disintegrates the project of European colonial modernity. He paved the way for his critical ideas and pointed us in the right direction, Contemporary Orientalism requires a new study of a more intense discourse.