Orientalism Resurrected: Veiling Truth, Unveiling bias: The Case of Jan Goodwin's Price of Honor: Muslim Women Lift the Veil of Silence

Abstract

It seems that Orientalism is enjoying a resurgence, offering yet more distorted images of the Muslim world, and more specifically Muslim women. In this essay, I take Jan Goodwin’s Price of Honor as a case in point, a book which projects images that seem to galvanize around an inferior Muslim world where men are bloodthirsty, polygamous and helplessly oppressive of female members of their families. The book reiterates Edward Said’s views on the West’s creation of an “imagined” Orient, yet adds to it new charted cartographies of a reductionist Islamic world that allegedly possesses identical traits. First, the paratextual elements of Goodwin’s book are quite revealing: the cover picture of veiled Afghani women, the sensational title, chapter titles, epigraphs and maps are extremely telling of the preconceived ideas on which the book rests and which the text only supports. The language chosen and the “facts” listed in Goodwin’s account reflect an obvious Orientalist perspective and lead to erroneous overgeneralization that would in turn offer readers distorted images of Islamic cultures and peoples. Goodwin’s work unfortunately seems to offer a superficial understanding of Islam and is an example of the Islamophobia currently pervading the world. Thus, Goodwin fails in her mission to “lift the veil of silence” of Arab women and instead helps in propagating negative images of Muslim women through revisited Orientalist lenses.