Under the Sign of Orientalism: The West vs. Islam

Abstract

n the last ten years, a rapidly growing mass movement has erupted into the world political scene: an Islamic fundamentalism challenging Western economic, political, and cultural hegemony in its totality. In many Muslim countries today, from the Middle East to Southeast Asia, a new radical-popular nationalism is being articulated by a revival of Islamic religious tradition, principles, and rituals. By rewriting modernity as a fake and corrupted world and modernization as a false historical narrative, Islamic fundamentalism has brought to the surface a historically sedimented antagonism, the one between the West and Islam. This antagonism has many different layers and is overdetermined by a series of binary oppositions: reason vs. dogma, democracy vs. despotism, civilization vs. medievalism, modernity vs. tradition, and so on. Our aim here is to locate it historically. The antagonism between the West and Islam is not the expression of an eternal conflict between two separate and irreconcilable worlds. This historical location is quite recent and specific. Whatever the literal content or political tendency of Islamism, its very presence signi-