The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard

by Ian Almond

The west's Orientalism -- its construction of the Arab "Other" -- has been exposed, examined and expurgated under the critical theory microscope in recent years yet the issue has acquired renewed urgency in light of the current climate of fear and hysteria about the Islamic world. At the same time post-modern 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 subtle form of Orientalism. Examining the work of Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Zizek and of post-modern writers from Borges to Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk, Ian Almond also draws on Muslim thinkers including Akbar S. Ahmed and Bobby S. Sayyid in this timely project. The result is a provocative examination of the effects and implications of this "use" of Islam for both the post-modern project and for Islam itself.

Genres: Islam, Philosophy, Religion, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism

229 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Ian Almond is a Professor of World Literature at Georgetown University (Qatar). He received his PhD in English Literature from Edinburgh University in 2000. He is the author of five books, most recently Two Faiths, One Banner (Harvard University Press, 2009) and History of Islam in German Thought (Routledge, 2010), and over forty articles in a variety of journals including PMLA, Radical Philosophy, ELH and New Literary History. He specializes in comparative world literature, with a tri-continental emphasis on Mexico, Bengal and Turkey. His books have been translated into eleven languages, including Arabic, Russian, Turkish, Korean, Serbo-Croat, Persian and Indonesian. His fifth book, on Nirad C. Chaudhuri, came out with Cambridge University Press last year.

Reviews

[Elizabeth D · Rating 3 out of 5]

I blew through this book fairly quickly so I may be missing some nuances, but overall I was disappointed. This book deals with nine 'postmodern' thinkers - Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida, Borges, Rushdie, Pamuk, Kristeva, Baudrillard, and Žižek - and their engagement with Islam. There are some interesting insights and readings of particular writers (I also think Almond is correct to argue that any attempt to justify religious doctrine on the basis of postmodern criticism of secularism/ity is doomed to fail, because this postmodernist arguments cut across religious truth just as they do the claims of ye olde Enlightenment). But, as one might expect from a postmodern critique of postmodernism, there is little to grab onto or take from the work, except that Orientalism is extremely difficult to escape from, epistemology is all, etc. This is particularly stark in his discussion of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (something I'm quite interested in), where Almond's critique revolves almost solely around the question of whether Foucault was/wasn't Orientalist, deals with (the many!) Marxist responses to the Iranian Rev in a cursory and often misleading way, and in general misses the most important questions about that historical event. Mostly I think I should just stop reading this kind of literature anymore bc I haven't gotten anything out of it for a while.

[Ibn Shamal · Rating 2 out of 5]

Painful read, and far less important than Said's Orientalism. Each chapter digs deep to find controversy and without the authors having the ability to debate his conclusions it seems extremely critical without much substance. Occasionally I agreed with him but it was rare and only in passing. Also, if you enjoy authors who use foreign words without explanation or when they say things like Joyceian, Foucautian, Saidian, etc. etc. etc. without explanation then you will enjoy this book.

[v · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ian Almond does a fine job finding, presenting, and analyzing remarks about Islam in the works of the authors included; so if you are curious what Nietzsche, for example, wrote about Islam, this is a good scholarly resource. The Derrida chapter, for other reasons as well, is the best. He's also fairly charitable in most chapters.
Beyond that, though, this book is quite aimless and dubious. First off, say that all of these authors really are orientalist: so what? What does that mean, who cares, and why does it matter that their comments about Islam aren't very deep or respectful? Almond, as one might expect, never seriously considers this and instead assumes a very specific, narrow view that implicitly defers to Edward Said every step of the way (while politely failing to follow that infinite spiral of Western self-reflexivity to its inevitable conclusion regarding Almond's own study). A smaller question, but one that I feel Almond absolutely should have and utterly failed to consider, is: what is postmodernism? What is it, how are all these writers connected to it, and what does that mean for their claims about Islam? While he seems to have a decent grasp on what each of these writers individually thought, if there is no consideration of what postmodernism is -- Almond connects postmodernism to the "playful" and "ironic," and basically leaves it at that until a series of light, detached remarks in the concluding chapter -- then what is the point of specifically studying postmodern representations of Islam? And what is the point of a postmodern critique (which is what this book in fact attempts) of postmodern representations of Islam if postmodernism is never discussed? This culminates in the worst and least charitable chapter of the book, on Jean Baudrillard, where Almond can only stand aghast in horror (like the hostile secondary sources he exclusively cites) at what Baudrillard wrote while also managing to never discuss or even mention the numerous papers in which Baudrillard explicitly discusses what orientalism and exoticism means in postmodernity for him.
There's also the overt smugness of the study and the noncommittal writing (many paragraphs include a line like: "one has the sense..." "it would seem that..." "one can't help but think..." As a result, Almond just implies what he thinks you should conclude without actually demonstrating it, or reiterates the assertions and "indignation" of others) that drag it down. And even more unfortunately, Almond never truly discusses Islam; no, Almond stays at the same superficial level of engagement with Islam as his targets do.