The Muslim as the “Other”: Representation and Self-Image of the Muslims in North America

Abstract

Abstract The politics of representing Islam and Muslims in American cultural and political discourse and the Muslims’ reponse to it in how they interpret Islam and identify themselves, reveal a dialectical relationship between Western representations of Muslims and Muslims’ self-image. In this dynamic process, the “otherness” of Islam and Muslims has two functions. It acts as a dynamic of identification, by default, for the American. At the same time, it is appropriated by the Muslim as a form of self-identification. Both functions are germane to a mode of representation characteristic to a particular and dominant political and cultural discourse in the United States: a mode that is essentially ethnocentric.