Orientalism And Imperialism
Orientalism and Imperialism have dominated the psyche of both the Western and Arab/Muslim worlds respectively. Combined with the inherent fear resulting from each world’s history of aggression with the other, this creates an inevitable conflict between the two civilizations. Orientalism plagues the Western world’s consciousness through the portrayal of Arab/Muslim society as one filled with violent, misogynistic men and a female population that exists solely to serve the men’s every need. Imperialism likewise fuels the fear in the Arab/Muslim world that Westerners are power-hungry, totalitarian warlords bent on destroying the Arab nations and seizing land and resources for their own benefit. In Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations,
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Said criticizes recurring images in American media of Arabs bent on death and destruction, enraged mobs shouting obscenities against America, and the association of the Muslim faith base with terrorism. These images root themselves into the daily psyche of the Western world and make it seemingly easier to accept aggression toward the Arab world. Said gives an example of how, while researching one of his books on the coverage of Islam by the Western media, he discovered “an arsenal of images...giving an impression of the utmost negative, evil emanation. So the impression you got of Islam was that ... the main business of Muslims was to threaten and try to kill Americans.”6 This type of thinking is what a man by the name of Michel Foucault described in his theories on a perceived reality7 and the resulting actions in accordance with that reality. A window into this conflict of cultures can be found in an account of an experience that author John Perkins had which he writes about in his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.8 Perkins tells the story of how he was invited to a performance during one of his visits to the Middle East. The show was political, and included imagery of America bent on destroying weakened countries and exploiting resources in other Arab countries, concepts rooted almost exclusively in fears of Imperialism from America and the Western world. Perkins’ reaction was to fear an attack from the crowd, seemingly that they would identify him as a Westerner. This fear likewise was rooted in the Orientalism of the Arab world in the American public, most specifically through seemingly biased media coverage. This attitude, feared by Perkins, is repeated as the product of America’s imperialist advances in an
Said criticizes recurring images in American media of Arabs bent on death and destruction, enraged mobs shouting obscenities against America, and the association of the Muslim faith base with terrorism. These images root themselves into the daily psyche of the Western world and make it seemingly easier to accept aggression toward the Arab world. Said gives an example of how, while researching one of his books on the coverage of Islam by the Western media, he discovered “an arsenal of images...giving an impression of the utmost negative, evil emanation. So the impression you got of Islam was that ... the main business of Muslims was to threaten and try to kill Americans.”6 This type of thinking is what a man by the name of Michel Foucault described in his theories on a perceived reality7 and the resulting actions in accordance with that reality. A window into this conflict of cultures can be found in an account of an experience that author John Perkins had which he writes about in his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.8 Perkins tells the story of how he was invited to a performance during one of his visits to the Middle East. The show was political, and included imagery of America bent on destroying weakened countries and exploiting resources in other Arab countries, concepts rooted almost exclusively in fears of Imperialism from America and the Western world. Perkins’ reaction was to fear an attack from the crowd, seemingly that they would identify him as a Westerner. This fear likewise was rooted in the Orientalism of the Arab world in the American public, most specifically through seemingly biased media coverage. This attitude, feared by Perkins, is repeated as the product of America’s imperialist advances in an