Arab Representations of the Occident East-West Encounters in Arabic Fiction by Rasheed El-Enany (London and New York: Routledge, 2006. 255 pages.)

Abstract

In his Orientalism (Vintage Books: 1978), literature teacher and cultural
critic Edward Said claimed that the entire corpus of academic, literary, and
artistic knowledge about the Orient in general and theMuslim world in particular
that the West had accumulated and shaped was built up solely to
serve its desire to conquer, control, and subjugate the Orient. His thesis was
widely discussed and influenced the study of the Middle East and the attitudes
of numerous scholars.According to Said, theWest depicts the Orient
as stagnant, static, exotic, submissive, and retarded, in contrast to the supposedly
enlightened and superior West. Some thirty years after the furor caused by this book, Rasheed El-
Enany’s Arab Representations of the Occident: East-West Encounters in
Arabic Fiction challenges Said’s theory, at least with respect toArabic literature.
El-Enany claims that Said only presented the western perspective and
ignored the Oriental resistance to it. In response, he presents the East-West
encounter through his own eyes, those of anArab intellectual who was born
and raised in Cairo and moved to Great Britain in 1977 during his twenties ...