American Orientalism within the East/ West Dichotomy

Abstract

It is undeniable that as a species of Enlightenment discourse, Orientalism has been a carrier of basic Western notions of the Western self and the non-Western other which generated unfalsifiable propositions about the superiority of Westerners to non-Westerners. In this way, orientalists participated in the elaboration of modern Western cultural identity. While the earlier Orientalism had produced areas that aided the colonization of the Orient by providing ideological pretexts; the new version of Orientalism has employed forthright political implications. Their Manichean view posits an unchanging, traditional, totalitarian Islam in perpetual conflict with an enlightened, democratic, egalitarian and free West. Our point is to address this pressing and current issue of our time and our effort would be to make a categorization of Orientalisms; a traditional Orientalism and a neo- American one, also to dig into the history of the conflict, contemporary political realities, to the misconceptions and fallacies sown through a systematically distorted media representation. More precisely, the work focuses on the epistemological distinction between the traditional and the US neo-Orientalism one and how Islam is operating within.