Une interprétation des représentations occidentales de l'Islam

Abstract

Traditional western views of Muslims were a catalogue of prejudice in focusing on the alleged authoritarian and fatalistic character of Islam. In the western imagery, Muslims were sly, cruel and sensual, and this image was the product of cultural con flicts in which Islam was seen as a theological and political threat to Christianity. In more recent scholarship, it has been suggested that the negative image of Islam was the product of an Oriental discourse which survived for centuries, regardless of the inten tions of individual commentators on Islam. The idea that western attitudes were wholly negative and consistent is too simplistic. There were two distinct western views of Islam, namely a roman tic aristocratic version and a critical bourgeois image of the Orient. The aristocratic wing was generally sympathetic towards Islam, because it was hostile to the development of industrial capi talism in Europe. For such traditionalists, Islam represented an escape from a process of modernisation which they saw as des tructive of traditional values and institutions. By contrast, bour geois critics saw Islam as representative of precisely those institu tions and attitudes which they sought to destroy. In both cases, Islam as a construct was employed as a critical myth in the evalua tion of western society. The transformation of Islamic societies in the modern period has rendered both forms of imagery irrelevant in sociological terms, but their existence in the past makes it impossible to speak of one Oriental discourse. Social imagery is fractured by the cultural and class characteristics of the carriers of ideology and the traditional view of Islam in the West was bifur cated along class lines.