The New Orientalists

Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard

Ian Almond

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN:
  9781845113988
• eBook ISBN:
  9780857730930
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophical Criticism

The west's Orientalism - its construction of an Arab or Islamic 'Other' - has been exposed and examined under the critical theory microscope and thoroughly expelled, it seems, from academic thought. At the same time postmodern thinkers from Nietzsche onwards have employed the motifs and symbols of the Islamic Orient within an ongoing critique of western modernity, an appropriation which, this hugely controversial book argues, runs every risk of becoming a new and more insidious Orientalist strain.Ian Almond sensitively yet rigorously examines the work of Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Zizek, as well as that of postmodern writers Jorge Luis Borges, Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk. In doing so he exposes the implications of this 'use' of Islam for both the postmodern project and for Islam itself. Taking apart the assumptions, omissions and contradictions inherent in these thinkers' approaches to Islam and to the Arab world, and drawing on the work of prominent Muslim thinkers including Ziauddin Sardar, Aziz Al-Azmeh and Bobby S. Sayyid, "The New Orientalists" highlights the difficulty of ever speaking truly about the 'Other'.
In light of the current Western climate of fear and hysteria surrounding the Islamic world, this groundbreaking project could hardly be more timely.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• I Islam and the critique of modernity
• 1 Nietzsche’s peace with Islam
• 2 Foucault’s Iran and the madness of Islam
• 3 Derrida’s Islam and the peoples of the book
• II Islam and postmodern fiction
• 4 Borges and the finitude of Islam
• 5 The many Islams of Salman Rushdie
• 6 Islam and melancholy in Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book
• III Islam, ‘theory’ and Europe
• 7 Kristeva and Islam’s time
• 8 Islam and Baudrillard’s last hope against the New World Order
• 9 Iraq and the Hegelian legacy of Žižek’s Islam
• Concluding thoughts
• Notes
• Bibliography