From Orientalism to Islamophobia: Reflections, Confirmations, and Reservations

Damir Skenderovic,Christina Späti

doi:10.13169/reorient.4.2.0130

Abstract

While European Orientalism looks back on a long history, the rise of Islamophobia is generally found to have taken place since the 1990s. Both phenomena rely on recurrent and shifting ideas, tropes and narratives that are used when imagining and describing the Other, and tend to be based on variations of “Muslim,” “Jew,” and “Orient.” This introduction raises several aspects that are important in order to understand the two phenomena, as well as to appreciate the similarities and differences between them. While it is obvious that some typically orientalist tropes have made their way into contemporary Islamophobia, the contributions in this special issue of ReOrient also demonstrate that Orientalism can be understood as a multi-layered construct that conflated negative with positive sentiments, and thereby also occasionally romanticized the “Orient.” In contrast, Islamophobia is based on the unidimensional conception of an essentialized Islam and a racialized Muslim. Fueled by negative prejudices and stereotypes, it results in attitudes asserting undesirability, distrust, and hostility.

Highlights

While European Orientalism looks back on a long history, the rise of Islamophobia is generally found to have taken place since the 1990s
University of Fribourg, Switzerland www.plutojournals.com/reorient on by pointing to the “clash of cultures playing out on the West’s very soil” and evoking the notion that Western societies are discovering “with anxiety and fear, that sex in the Muslim world is sick” and that “the disease is spreading to their own lands.”3 Without going into the details of the criticism generated by Daoud’s texts and the polemic dispute that followed and which extended beyond being a debate among French intellectuals, let us look at three points of critique that are of particular significance in the context of this journal issue
Some critics of Kamel Daoud’s texts raised the point that his arguments, while concerned with the ways in which the Europe of today faces up to immigration and attempts to deal with the Other, in this case Muslims, bear historical references disclosing a continuity of discourse that goes all the way from Orientalism to Islamophobia and thereby reproduces distinct asymmetric structures of power