Ian Almond and Abdur-Rahman Abuo-Almajd around the New Orientalists

It is funny, isn’t it? Bernard Lewis removed Orientalism from its name at the last conference of Orientalism in Paris in 1973, on other hand Edward Said refused and wrote Orientalism to prove, no doubt Orientalism has gone wrong and asleep, then Post Colonial Orientalism and now New Orientalism .

We have a fresh opportunity to reflect about the New Orientalists, more particularly the New Orientalists in the public square. At this point Professor Ian Almond isn't going to speak about his views on his work only but new orientalists too .

Ian Almond .

He is Professor of World Literature. He received his PhD in English Literature from Edinburgh University in 2000, specializes in South Asian literature and teaches World Literature at Georgetown University in Qatar. His specializations consist of Post-colonial theory, South Asian literature, representations of Islam and world literature. He's particularly known for his works on Islam.  He is the author of four books, His books have been translated into several languages, including Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Korean, Indonesian and Bosnian/Serbo-Croat .

Sufism and Deconstruction: Sufism and deconstruction : a comparative study of Derrida and Ibn ʻArabi., 2004 .

The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard. 2007 Two Faiths, One Banner: When Muslims marched with Christians across Europe's battlegrounds., 2009 .

History of Islam in German Thought from Leibniz to Nietzsche., 2010 .

Readers should be known that although my friend Ian lost his late mum a few days ago, he managed to complete the interview, we all thank you .

Q: First of all I wonder what made you focus on New Orientalists ?

I A: I had been avid readers of these figures – Borges, Derrida, Rushdie – for quite a few years. But when I moved to Turkey (at the age of 28) to teach at a university there, I began to grow curious about what these various thinkers and writers had to say about Islam, Muslims and the general Middle East .

Q: It is known that Orientalism is a feature of the popular right-wing media and the fear, hysteria and paranoia of the post-9/11 world ,; what made you take up New Orientalism
?

I A: Well, since literary/intellectual movements such as deconstruction, new historicism and psychoanalysis do such a good job of analysing the ways in which hysteria and Islamophobic paranoia emerge, you would imagine that the most central figures amongst them might reflect a more self-critical attitude towards Islam and concepts such as Eurocentrism. This is not always the case .

Q: You show that Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche and Kant knew a lot more about Islam than they let on, I wonder how you prove .

I A: Mostly through archive work – reading the texts nobody reads. I looked at the newspaper Hegel edited for a year in 1807, and discovered a wealth of attention to the Ottoman empire which is wholly left out of his (notoriously) Eurocentric philosophy. Or I looked at lists of the books these thinkers had in their libraries or ordered from libraries – Marx , towards the end of his life, was reading a vast amount about other cultures, quite contrary to the narrow-minded, Europe-focused, universalizing image which is given of him. He was interested in the (I believe erroneous) belief that private property had been abolished in the Islamic world .

Q: Could you elaborate on the aim of the book is to establish the genealogy of a gesture, of the use of foreign value-systems to elucidate ?

I A: I’m interested in how thinkers approach cultures they are unfamiliar with, and appropriate those elements of it which correspond to their own fantasies or needs. I don’t know if it’s an entirely clear and one-way process. Nietzsche’s response to Islam – as a critic of European Christianity and modernity, he projected onto Islam a fantasized version of his own desires which was based on a fragmentary, selective knowledge of the faith. Many of the things Nietzsche saw wrong in Christianity are visibly the same in Islam. This is true even further back – Protestants, in their struggle against Catholics, like to emphasize things like iconophobia in Islam as a means of finding common ground with them .

Q: As a historian, Almond seems to be most interested in showing how Islam has been an overlooked factor in the formation of Europe what about your proves on that ?

I A: One of the open yet unspeakable secrets in Europe today is that the history of Europe and the history of Islam belong to one another. For over a millenium Muslims, Christians and Jews have lived around the same sea (the Mediterranean), sharing often the same languages and food and architectures. This isn’t idealistic fantasy – it is historical reality. So many of Europe’s most central icons have a Middle Eastern origin – whether it is St Augustine (the North African bishop) or the modern novel, whose Arabic influences (the multiple narrative tradition which came into vernacular languages in Europe during the 12th and 13th centuries) made themselves felt through Chaucer and Boccaccio. I’m so tired of this “Islam and the West” nonsense. I spent a lot of energy on one book, trying to show all the moments in the military history of Europe where Muslims and Christians fought on the same side. Before writing it, I thought I would only find a handful of moments , perhaps a couple of battles here and there. My research took me completely by surprise – there have always been Muslim and Christian soldiers fighting together. The famous Ottoman army that marched on Vienna in 1683 has always been seen as a historic moment when “Islam” threatened to storm “the gates of Europe”. Half of that army was Christian – tens of thousands of Hungarian Calvinists were marching alongside the Turks against the Catholic Habsburgs. And this is not exceptional .

 Q: The blurb of the back cover describes the book as timely and suggests that the new orientalism has implications for Islam, Could you elaborate on that, please ?

I A: Well, let’s take the example of ISIS, a face of Islam which has, over the past three months, enjoyed a truly breathtaking level of attention in the West. I want to be careful here: of course, the movement is disgusting and its methods appalling. But what interests me is the way we selectively focus our apocalyptic outrage in the West on these militants, when our own history has shown we are capable of equal atrocities. In Guatemala, for example, US-financed counter-insurgency soldiers killed children by pulling their stomachs out of them. Over 70,000 people died during the late 1970s and early 1980s – why does ISIS have the monopoly on evil? Why are we so good? In the West, we are delighted with ISIS – I mean that. It legitimizes our fantasy that we are decent, we are free and just, we are on the side of Light against Darkness .

Q: No doubt you have been living among Muslims for long time, treating with Muslims and know Islam is peace, Most of Muslims condemn ISIS, ISIS is said to be one of the propaganda & organization working for America to create unrest in Middle East/Arab countries, You managed to examine 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, I want to know what you want to add .

I A:I had thought about adding a chapter on the American novelist John Barth, but I’m not sure he is read that much anymore, so in the end I relented .

Abdur-Rahman: Why don’t you add Herman Melville, I have been enjoying reading Moby Dick, at the end thank you very much, Ian .