When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, his foreign policy was at first seen to be the antithesis of that of his predecessor, George W. Bush. Eid Mohamed highlights how in the wake of this change of US administration, Arab media, literature and cinema began to assert the value of America as a potential source of `change' while attempting to renegotiate the Arab world's position in the international system. Arab cultural representation of the United States has variously changed and developed since 9/11, and again in the wake of the protests in 2011 and the ensuing political turmoil in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and of course, Syria. Taking this into account, Mohamed offers an examination of the ways in which stereotypes of America are both presented and challenged through cinema, fiction and the wider media and intellectual production. Rather than seeing this process as one where the Middle East reacts to and attempts to negotiate with western modernity, Mohamed instead highlights the significant interplay of religion, pop culture and politics and the role they play in shaping the complex relation between America and the nations of the Middle East.

Twenty-five years ago, Edward Said's Orientalism spawned a generation of scholarship on the denigrating and dangerous mirage of "the East" in the Western colonial mind. But "the West" is the more dangerous mirage of our own time, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit argue, and the idea of "the West" in the minds of its self-proclaimed enemies remains largely unexamined and woefully misunderstood. Occidentalism is their groundbreaking investigation of the demonizing fantasies and stereotypes about the Western world that fuel such hatred in the hearts of others. We generally understand "radical Islam" as a purely Islamic phenomenon, but Buruma and Margalit show that while the Islamic part of radical Islam certainly is, the radical part owes a primary debt of inheritance to the West. Whatever else they are, al Qaeda and its ilk are revolutionary anti-Western political movements, and Buruma and Margalit show us that the bogeyman of the West who stalks their thinking is the same one who has haunted the thoughts of many other revolutionary groups, going back to the early nineteenth century. In this genealogy of the components of the anti-Western worldview, the same oppositions appear again and again: the heroic revolutionary versus the timid, soft bourgeois; the rootless, deracinated cosmopolitan living in the Western city, cut off from the roots of a spiritually healthy society; the sterile Western mind, all reason and no soul; the machine society, controlled from the center by a cabal of insiders—often Jews—pulling the hidden levers of power versus an organically knit-together one, a society of "blood and soil." The anti-Western virus has found a ready host in the Islamic world for a number of legitimate reasons, they argue, but in no way does that make it an exclusively Islamic matter. A work of extraordinary range and erudition, Occidentalism will permanently enlarge our collective frame of vision

In the decades since Edward Said first christened the term 'Orientalism', the discourse on the West's historical representation of the East has been inundated with new literature. While the Western perception of the 'the Orient' has become a well-worn topic in the field of Asian and Middle Eastern studies, the way in which the Arab world has come to perceive the West has been largely neglected. Occidentalisms in the Arab World not only presents a comprehensive overview and pointed commentary on recent works in the emerging field of Occidentalist studies, but also provides new insight on the interplay between ideology and image in the formulation of 'the West'. Robbert Woltering offers an in-depth look at the ways in which multiple representations - occidentalisms - of the West have developed in Egypt since the end of the Cold War. From the pivotal classics of Sayyid Qutb and Gamal Abdel Nasser to the contemporary works of Muhammad Imara and Galal Amin, 'Occidentalisms in the Arab World' explores the political undertones in the 'imagined West' in Egyptian media. Through the rigorous analysis of newspaper editorials, scholarly literature, widely-circulated books, and visual media, Woltering examines the competing influences of leftist-nationalist, liberal, and Islamist ideologies within the context of the broader struggle for political supremacy in the region. Drawing from the work of intellectuals at the respective forefronts of these movements, Woltering explores the nuanced relationship between image and ideology, which has shaped the how the West is perceived within the Arab world today. 'Occidentalisms in the Arab World' provides an unparalleled and original commentary in an emerging field at the intersection of Middle East Studies, Political Science, and Media Studies.

Evaluates the East-West encounter portrayed in Maghrebi literature from colonial times to the post-9/11 period.

In recent years debates about the nature and future of the West have been high on the political agenda. Prognoses of the West’s imminent demise have been countered by those arguing for its continued relevance, or those arguing that while the West will survive its nature, and the balance of power between its constituent units, is transforming. This book argues that understanding contemporary developments requires subjecting the very idea of the West to critical scrutiny and in particular asking what kind of concept it actually is. Locating the West as a discursive concept the book argues attempts to save, fix or reclaim the meaning of the West are illustrative of political agendas rather than indicative of accurate claims about the essential nature of the West. In contrast, the book argues that as a concept the West is impregnated with various discursive legacies, the most embedded of which are those of a civilisational, modern and political West. However, while attempts to define the West’s essence are therefore doomed to fail, given the concept’s historical and discursive flexibility, such attempts reaffirm the legitimising role which claims to the West continue to perform. Beyond this, the book challenges traditional genealogies of the West, which overwhelmingly depict the West as an inside-out concept. In contrast, the book argues that historically outsiders have played an important role in defining the nature of the West and constituting it as a political subject; processes that remain evident today. This book will particularly interest students of critical security studies, critical geopolitics, European politics, American politics and IR theory.

Islamic religion has become an object of political discourse in ways that also affects academic reflection; against this background this volume aims to provide a theoretically and empirically founded assessment of where social sciences currently stand with regard to Islam. For this purpose, the volume continues to develop the sociological knowledge of Islam that began in the 1980s. Given the Orientalism inherent in sociology, the volume focuses on Muslim knowledge systems and institutions, as well as the practice of Muslim religiosity in various social contexts stretching from Algeria and Morocco to Turkey.

This is one of the first books in English to explore Arab responses to Western culture and values in modern Arab literature. Through in-depth research El-Enany examines the attitudes as expressed mainly through works of fiction written by Arab authors during the twentieth, and, to a lesser extent, nineteenth century. It constitutes an original addition to the age-old East-West debate, and is particularly relevant to the current discussion on Islam and the West. Alongside raising highly topical questions about stereotypical ideas concerning Arabs and Muslims in general, the book explores representations of the West by the foremost Arab intellectuals over a two-century period, up to the present day, and will appeal to those with an interest in Islam, the Middle East, nationalism and the so-called ‘Clash of Civilizations’.