The New Orientalists

Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard

The west's Orientalism, its construction of an Arabic and Islamic 'Other', has been exposed, examined and expurgated under the critical theory microscope. 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 branch of Orientalism. Examining the work of Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Zizek and of postmodern 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 rigorous yet provocative book to expose the implications of this 'use' of Islam for both the postmodern project and for Islam itself. In light of the current climate of fear and hysteria about the Islamic world, The New Orientalists could hardly be more timely.