In light of the ongoing public debate that focuses on differences between Islam and the West, this book suggests a change of perspective. It departs from the observation that both western Orientalists and Islamist activists have defined Islam similarly as an all-encompassing religious, political and social system. In shifting from differences to similarities, it leaves behind the increasingly circular debate about the "true" nature of Islam in which the Muslim religion has been represented either as intrinsically hostile to or as principally compatible with modern culture. Instead, it associates the evolution of a particularly essentialist image of Islam with a complex process of cross-cutting (self)-interpretations of Muslim and Western societies within an emerging global public sphere. Putting its focus on the life and work of a number of paradigmatic individuals, the book investigates the intellectual encounters and discursive interdependencies among western and Muslim intellectuals. In a historical genealogy it deconstructs the essentialist image of Islam in uncovering its conceptual foundations in the modern transformation of European and Muslim societies from the nineteenth century onwards. Thereby, the changing infrastructure of the global public sphere has facilitated the gradual popularization, trivialization, and dissemination of a previously elitist discourse on Islam and modernity. In this way, the idea of Islam as an all-encompassing system has been turned into accepted knowledge in the Western and Muslim worlds alike.

Edward Said’s Orientalism, now more than fifty years old, has to be one of the most frequently cited books among academics in a wide range of disciplines, and the most frequently assigned book to undergraduates at colleges. Among the common questions raised in response to Said’s book: Did scholars in Western Europe provide crucial support to the imperialist, colonialist activities of European regimes? Are their writings on Islam laden with denigrating, eroticized, distorting biases that have left an indelible impact on Western society? What is the "Orientalism" invented by Europe and what is its impact today? However, one question has been less raised (or less has been done about the question): How were the Orientalist writings of European scholars of Islam received among their Muslim contemporaries? An international team of contributors rectify this oversight in this volume.

Featuring Immanuel Wallerstein, Joseph Massad, Marnia Lazreg, and other well-known and emerging new authors, this book seeks a more accurate understanding of Islam and Islamic societies' role and relations to global cultural and economic realities. The book confronts a trend today of analyzing Islam as a "cultural system" that stands outside of, and even predates, modernity. The authors see this trend as part of a racist discourse unaware of the realities of contemporary Islam. Islamic societies today are products of the world capitalist system and cannot be understood as being separate from its forces. The authors offer a more carefully constructed and richer portrait of Islamic societies today and forcefully challenge the belief that Islam is not part of, nor much affected by, the modern world-system.

Over the past few decades, a new form of Orientalism has been developing. As exemplified by Elie Kedourie and Bernard Lewis, it points to Islam as the West's archenemy. The rise of political Islam and its opposition to Western domination of the Islamic world are seen as evidence of a deep, abiding hatred of all things Western. Accordingly, the new Orientalists call for thorough reforms, among them regime changes, wars, and the imposition of 'democracy' on Islamic societies. They warn that if the West shrinks from this challenge, the Islamists will surely gain power and destroy the West. The essays in this book "written after 9-11" dispute the new Orientalist presumption of an unchanging Islam, opposed to "Western" values and incapable of adapting to the modern world. The not-so-hidden objective of the new Orientalism is to promote acceptance of the US and Israel's imperialist push into the Islamic world as both a security imperative and a civilizing mission. Alam argues that the new Orientalists claim of a categorical split between Islam and the West is based on a biased, inaccurate interpretation of history. While recognizing the political and economic failings of the Islamic world, Alam shows that they are legacies of two centuries of Western imperialism and are shared by all regions at the periphery of the prevailing global capitalism. If the Islamic world lags behind China and India, it is because of two factors that have given a new edge to Western involvement in West Asia and North Africa: oil and Zionism. In Alam's view, Israel is a powerful destabilizing force in the region, whose survival depends upon turning the Western-Islamic conflict into a hot war. Not surprisingly, many of the new Orientalists are strong partisans of Israel.

A groundbreaking response to the challenges of interpreting Islamic religion in the post-9/11 and post-Orientalist era Rethinking Islamic Studies upends scholarly roadblocks in post-Orientalist discourse within contemporary Islamic studies and carves fresh inroads toward a robust new understanding of the discipline, one that includes religious studies and other politically infused fields of inquiry. Editors Carl W. Ernst and Richard C. Martin, along with a distinguished group of scholars, map the trajectory of the study of Islam and offer innovative approaches to the theoretical and methodological frameworks that have traditionally dominated the field. In the volume's first section the contributors reexamine the underlying notions of modernity in the East and West and allow for the possibility of multiple and incongruent modernities. This opens a discussion of fundamentalism as a manifestation of the tensions of modernity in Muslim cultures. The second section addresses the volatile character of Islamic religious identity as expressed in religious and political movements at national and local levels. In the third section, contributors focus on Muslim communities in Asia and examine the formation of religious models and concepts as they appear in this region. This study concludes with an afterword by accomplished Islamic studies scholar Bruce B. Lawrence reflecting on the evolution of this post-Orientalist approach to Islam and placing the volume within existing and emerging scholarship. Rethinking Islamic Studies offers original perspectives for the discipline, each utilizing the tools of modern academic inquiry, to help illuminate contemporary incarnations of Islam for a growing audience of those invested in a sharper understanding of the Muslim world.

The history of western notions about Islam is of obvious scholarly as well as popular interest today. This book investigates Christian images of the Muslim Middle East, focusing on the period from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, when the nature of divine as well as human power was under particularly intense debate in the West. Ivan Kalmar explores how the controversial notion of submission to ultimate authority has in the western world been discussed with reference to Islam’s alleged recommendation to obey, unquestioningly, a merciless Allah in heaven and a despotic government on earth. He discusses how Abrahamic faiths – Christianity and Judaism as much as Islam – demand devotion to a sublime power, with the faith that this power loves and cares for us, a concept that brings with it the fear that, on the contrary, this power only toys with us for its own enjoyment. For such a power, Kalmar borrows Slavoj Zizek’s term "obscene father". He discusses how this describes exactly the western image of the Oriental despot - Allah in heaven, and the various sultans, emirs and ayatollahs on earth – and how these despotic personalities of imagined Muslim society function as a projection, from the West on to the Muslim Orient, of an existential anxiety about sublime power. Making accessible academic debates on the history of Christian perceptions of Islam and on Islam and the West, this book is an important addition to the existing literature in the areas of Islamic studies, religious history and philosophy.

Debates on the relationship between Islam and the West rage on, from talk of clashing civilizations to political pacification, from ethical and historical perspectives to distrust, xenophobia and fear. Here Mohammad Salama argues that the events of 9/11 force us to engage ourselves fully, without preconditions, in understanding not just the history of Islam as a religion, but of Islam as a historical condition that has existed in relationship to the West since the seventh century. Salama compares the Arab-Islamic and European traditions of historical thought since the early modern period, focusing on the watershed moments that informed the two traditions' ideas of intellectual history and perceptions of one another. He draws attention to European intellectual history's entangled links with the Islamic philosophy of history, especially the complexities of orientalism and modernity. Recent critical reflections on the work of Ibn Khald?n confirm this intertwined and troubled relationship, reflecting major disparities and contradictions. At the same time, recent Arab writings on Europe's intellectual history reveal a struggle against erasure and intellectual superiority. Calling for a new understanding of the relationship between Islam and the West, Salama argues that Islam has played a major role in enabling and positioning various paths of Western historiography at crucial moments of its development, leaving palpable imprints on Islamic historiography in the process. He proposes an answer to a fundamental question: how to make sense of the mechanics of production in Arab-Islamic and Western historiographies, or how to identify the ways in which they have both failed to make sense of themselves and of each other in an increasingly disenchanted postnationalist world. Spanning an impressive array of recent writings on these themes as well as older foundational texts in both traditions - including al-Tabar?, Ibn Khald?n, Hegel, al-Jabart?, Toynbee, Foucault, Edward Said, and Hourani - this book is both timely and crucial for all those interested in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, Western and Islamic philosophies of history, modernity, and the relationship between Islam and the West.

Orientalism and Literature discusses a key critical concept in literary studies and how it assists our reading of literature. It reviews the concept's evolution: how it has been explored, imagined and narrated in literature. Part I considers Orientalism's origins and its geographical and multidisciplinary scope, then considers the major genres and trends Orientalism inspired in the literary-critical field such as the eighteenth-century Oriental tale, reading the Bible, and Victorian Oriental fiction. Part II recaptures specific aspects of Edward Said's Orientalism: the multidisciplinary contexts and scholarly discussions it has inspired (such as colonial discourse, race, resistance, feminism and travel writing). Part III deliberates upon recent and possible future applications of Orientalism, probing its currency and effectiveness in the twenty-first century, the role it has played and continues to play in the operation of power, and how in new forms, neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia, it feeds into various genres, from migrant writing to journalism.