Orientalism as OccidentalismAuthor(s): Joseph Massad

Source: History of the Present , Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring 2015), pp. 83-94
Published by: University of Illinois Press

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 Orientalism as Occidentalism
Joseph Massad
In Orientalism, Edward Said’s efforts were dedicated to uncovering how the
“Oriental” other of the Occidental self was formed and conjured up. His
seminal book would also explicate the constitution of this Occidental self,
an explication that would become generative of a large body of literature that
followed in its footsteps. In this brief contribution, I argue that the lasting
and ongoing impact of Orientalism is its uncovering of the Occidentalism
that subtends Orientalist discourse and institutions. Whereas Said does
not always name what Orientalism presupposes as “Occidentalism,” and
although his engagement with the notion of Occidentalism in this book and
in later writings is sparse and not always consistent with the theoretical
apparatus that he constructs in Orientalism, the definition of Occidentalism
that I offer is based, as will be shown, on a decidedly Saidean apparatus.
The term has been rebarbatively appropriated and extracted from his text by
critics, both sympathetic and antipathetic to his project. A careful reading of
Said’s major line of argumentation in his book, however, offers a particular
understanding of Occidentalism as the discourse through which what came
to be constituted as the Occident was reactively formed, in the Nietzschean
sense, by a series of projections that othered the entire world outside of this
constituted Occident.
Said explains that the Oriental conjures up the identity of the Occidental:
“Such categories as impostor (or Oriental, for that matter), imply, indeed re-
quire, an opposite that is neither fraudulently something else nor endlessly in
need of explicit identification. And that opposite is ‘Occidental.’”1 Examples
include how “the ‘bizarre jouissances’ of Orientals serve to highlight the so-
briety and rationality of Occidental habits.”2 Said concludes that the function
of Orientalism in the twentieth century is as “a code by which Europe could
interpret both itself and the Orient to itself.”3 He tells us while discussing
the work of Ernest Renan that “it is not too much to say that Renan’s philo-
logical laboratory is the actual locale of his European ethnocentrism; but
what needs emphasis here is that philological laboratory has no existence
outside the discourse, the writing by which it is constantly produced and
experienced. Thus even the culture he calls organic and alive—Europe’s—is
also a creature being created in the laboratory and by philology.”4 Said’s astute

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 roundtable • Massad

reading of Raymond Schwab identifies this relationship in the latter’s work

clearly: “In Schwab’s view, the Orient, however outré it may at first seem,
is a complement to the Occident, and vice versa.”5 Orientalism then, given
Said’s explications, is a, if not the, major component in the formation of
Occidentalism’s putative object: the Occident.
Whereas Said defined Orientalism clearly and unambiguously as “a style
of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made
between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) the ‘Occident,’”6 and as “a West-
ern style of dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Ori-
ent,”7 he anticipated what Occidentalism would be without naming it when
he added that “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting
itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground
self.”8 He would clarify that “as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea
that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that
have given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two geographical
entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other.”9 Said mentions
the term Occidentalism ambivalently in Orientalism on a few occasions and
brings it up briefly in subsequent writings, which would be later cited by
his critics and political enemies. He seems to posit the term as sometimes
operating as the opposite of Orientalism, its mirror image (rather than its
“secret sharer”), which seems at odds with his understanding of Orientalism.
But, as the following will show, he is not always clear that this is his intended
meaning.
Said announces early in the book that “to speak of scholarly specialization
as a geographical ‘field’ is, in the case of Orientalism, fairly revealing since
no one is likely to imagine a field symmetrical to it called Occidentalism.”10
What Said thinks this “reveals” is that for those who constituted themselves
as Occidentals and who continue to constitute themselves as such to study
Occidentalism, to acknowledge how they have formed themselves and been
formed would undercut the very fiction of their claim that the Occident was
a real place, and not an Idea. This would, in turn, overturn the binary which
makes them able to study what they constituted as the Orient. In this sense,
Occidentalism is always an uninterrogated essential point of departure for
Occidental Orientalist subjects. As any type of symmetry between Oriental-
ism and Occidentalism was not evident, something about Occidentalism in
its distinctiveness from Orientalism struck Said as important to note. He
tells us:

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 History of the Present

One of the important developments in nineteenth century Orientalism was the dis-
tillation of essential ideas about the Orient [ . . . ] into a separate and unchallenged
coherence; thus for a writer to use the word Oriental was a reference for the reader
sufficient to identify a specific body of information about the Orient. This information
seemed to be morally neutral and objectively valid; it seemed to have an epistemo-
logical status equal to that of historical chronology or geographical location. In its
most basic forms, then, Oriental material could not really be violated by anyone’s
discoveries, nor did it seem ever to be revaluated completely. Instead, the work of
various nineteenth-century scholars and of imaginative writers made this essential
body of knowledge more clear, more detailed, more substantial—and more distinct
from ‘Occidentalism.’11

Again, here Said does not offer a definition of this “Occidentalism” nor
an explanation of what it is. Rather, he seems to imply that the term des-
ignates a discursive lens through which Orientals represent the Occident,
which again is not symmetrical to Orientalism, as it lacks its power as a
dominating or authoritative discourse and set of institutions. In contrast to
Said, Egyptian philosopher Hasan Hanafi uses “Occidentalism” in exactly
this sense when he proposes that the others of Europe (Orientals, Africans,
and Native Americans), especially Arabs and Muslims, should study the Oc-
cident’s Orientalism not as source material to understand Arab and Muslim
civilization or the Arab and Muslim self, but rather as an object of study
which would allow them to study Europe and the Occident in a “neutral”
way. Instead of idealizing Europe and falling in the trap of “westernization,”
they would be undertaking this work without seeking or possessing power
over the Occident.12
Said’s last reference to Occidentalism is found on the last page of Oriental-
ism—lodged in the very lesson that he hopes his book will impart to future
generations:

If this book has any future use, it will be as a modest contribution to [ . . . ] challenge
[worldwide Orientalist hegemony], and as a warning: that systems of thought like
Orientalism, discourses of power, ideological fictions [ . . . ] are all too easily made,
applied, and guarded. Above all, I hope to have shown my reader that the answer
to Orientalism is not Occidentalism. No former ‘Oriental’ will be comforted by the
thought that having been an Oriental himself he is likely—too likely—to study new
‘Orientals’—or ‘Occidentals’—of his own making.13

This is perhaps the most perplexing of Said’s invocations of the term.

Whereas on the previous two occasions, he demonstrated clearly that Oc-
cidentalism could not be the opposite of or even the same (“symmetrical”) as

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 roundtable • Massad

Orientalism, indeed that it would be an impossible phenomenon altogether,

here he conjures it up as a potential “answer” to the “challenge” of Oriental-
ism. Yet Said cautions against this dialogic correspondence, which implies
that Occidentalism, as the opposite of Orientalism, can be willed or chosen
by Orientals answering the question or “the challenge” of Orientalism. But if
Orientalism “is the whole network of interests inevitably brought to bear on
(and therefore always involved in) any occasion when that particular entity
‘the Orient’ is in question,” then in the ongoing age of European Empires and
their U.S. extension, how could Occidentalism, if defined as the opposite of
Orientalism, be possible at all?14
I find that this third mention is the weakest of Said’s invocations of the
term and smacks of a proleptic political defensiveness that posits a liberal
egalitarianism between two incommensurable terms that cannot be equal-
ized. Here Said seems to suggest that Orientals could answer the challenge
of Orientalism with an Occidentalism of their own; thus he posits Orien-
tals and Occidentals as equal terms and subjectivities, after he had already
shown us that they could only exist as a binary in a hierarchy that structured
their inequality a priori. Also, in this last invocation he seems to present
Orientalism and Occidentalism as ontologies and epistemologies that are
not connected to institutions of power—including economic, military, so-
cial, ideological, and political—although he had previously insisted that this
was the case with Orientalism. In fact, given his other explicit invocations
of Occidentalism and his implicit references to it when he speaks of what
Orientalism presupposes, we can see clearly that Occidentalism is indeed
enmeshed in the very same network of powerful institutions. The Occident
and Occidentals are thereby produced through the ruse of presupposing their
existence as anterior to the discourse and the institutions that produce them
in the first place.
Both Said and his analysis of Orientalism in the book would be accused
by facile critics of being “Occidentalist” or “reverse Orientalist,” pushing
Said into more defensiveness in later writings. In Culture and Imperialism, for
example, he restated his argument in a different, even more damning, way:
“We [American intellectuals] have rarely been so fragmented, so sharply
reduced, and so completely diminished in our sense of what our true (as
opposed to asserted) cultural identity is. The fantastic explosion of special-
ized and separatist knowledge is partly to blame: Afrocentrism, Eurocen-
trism, Occidentalism, feminism, Marxism, deconstructionism, etc.”15 This

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 History of the Present

defensive posture is ironically manifest in the very book where Said expands
on his notion of Orientalism to include Europe’s relationship with the entire
world. As he informs us at the outset, “About five years after Orientalism
was published in 1978, I began to gather together some ideas about the gen-
eral relationship between culture and empire that had become clear to me
while writing that book . . . I have tried here to expand the arguments of the
earlier book to describe a more general pattern of relationships between the
modern metropolitan West and its overseas territories, [including] Africa,
India, parts of the Far East, Australia, and the Caribbean.”16
What is remarkable in the list of “isms” that Said invokes above is that
“Occidentalism” seems out of place amongst them (as is Eurocentrism).
What comes across most of all in this list, aside from Said’s irritation and
impatience with the other terms and the proliferation of their “isms,” is his
seeming inattention once again to the asymmetries between Occidentalism
(and Eurocentrism) and the rest of the isms he lists. Said’s defensiveness is
manifest throughout his “Afterword” to Orientalism, published in 1994, where
he sought to fend off those who attacked his book for allegedly being “anti-
Western” as opposed to being an analysis of how the Occident/West came
to be.17 He would later make the mistake, including in a 2003 new preface
to Orientalism, of falling into the unfortunate trap of a liberal equivalence
between Orientalist-inspired imperial jingoism in the United States and
Arab and Muslim “anti-Americanism,” thus echoing the last paragraph of
the 1978 edition of the book where he had forewarned against the use of Oc-
cidentalism as a response to Orientalism, which I mentioned above.18 Still,
this defensiveness did not halt his interest in how Occidentalism worlds the
world of Europe and non-Europe. This concern, which haunted him till the
end of his life, is invoked again as the problematic of identitarian essential-
ism and binaries in his late book, Freud and the Non-European.19
I take Said’s first definition of Orientalism as also applicable to Occiden-
talism, but I have rewritten his words with a slight modification: Occiden-
talism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological
distinction made between (most of the time) “the Orient” (but often the
entire world that lies outside what is defined or imagined as the “Occident”)
and the “Occident;” it is a “Western style of dominating” the entire know-
able world, including the Orient and the Occident.20 In this context, Said’s
judgment, which alienated many Europeans and Euro-Americans, should be
slightly modified. He states: “It is therefore correct that every European, in

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 roundtable • Massad

what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist,
and almost totally ethnocentric. Some of the immediate sting will be taken
out of these labels if we recall additionally that human societies, at least
the more advanced cultures, have rarely offered the individual anything but
imperialism, racism, and ethnocentrism for dealing with ‘other’ cultures.”21
It seems to me that given what Said’s analysis shows us of how the Occident
as much as the Orient were made and how people were subjectified as “Ori-
entals” and “Occidentals,” a more accurate version of his conclusion would
be the following: It is therefore correct that every European and Euro-American
who sees Europe and Euro-America as the core of this Occident, who assumes an Oc-
cidental consciousness, and who speaks as a representative of the Occident in what she
or he could say about the Orient and the Occident, was and is consequently a racist, an
imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.
This revised conclusion is borne out by other explications that Said offers
in describing the subject position of European Orientalists:

Now the Orientalist has become the representative man of his Western culture, a man
who compresses within his own work a major duality, of which that work (regardless
of its specific form) is the symbolic expression: Occidental consciousness, knowledge,
science taking hold of the furthest Oriental reaches as well as the most minute Oriental
particulars. Formally the Orientalist sees himself as accomplishing the union of Ori-
ent and Occident, but mainly by reasserting the technological, political, and cultural
supremacy of the West [ . . . ]. Because he feels himself to be standing at the very rim
of the East-West divide, the Orientalist not only speaks in vast generalities; he also
seeks to convey each aspect of Oriental or Occidental life into an unmediated sign of
one or the other geographical half.22

Said in fact identifies the Orientalist as having an “expert self” and a “tes-
timonial, beholding self as Western representative.”23
But if Orientalism identified one of the main others through which the
Occidental self was constituted, Occidentalism would be the study not only
of the constitution of the Occident but also of all its others, both internal
(the poor and propertyless; women, children, peasants, and laborers; and
the sexually, psychically, and physically deviant—not that these categories
are unrelated to one another) and external (Orientals, Africans, Native
Americans and Oceanians—not that these categories are unrelated to one
another, either). Ella Shohat reminds us in this regard that the designation of
Native Americans as “Orientals” and as “Indians” is important, not to men-
tion the inclusion in Columbus’s retinue of a Hebrew- and Arabic-speaking

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 History of the Present

converso, Luis de Torres, as a potential interpreter of the Orientals they

expected to encounter at the end of their voyage.24 Thus, Said’s statement
that there existed “an intellectual necessity of the Orient for the Occiden-
tal scholar of languages, cultures, and religions” should be supplemented,
whereby the intellectual necessity required not only that there existed an
Orient but also, and indeed foremost, an Occident for the Occidental scholars
of languages, cultures, and religions;25 Semitism, similarly, could only exist
in contrast with Indo-Europeanism, or more precisely Aryanism.26
Said rushes to explain that this does not mean that Arabs or Muslims are
the only ones able to apprehend and write about “their” societies:

The methodological failures of Orientalism cannot be accounted for either by say-

ing that the real Orient is different from Orientalist portraits of it, or by saying that
since Orientalists are Westerners for the most part, they cannot be expected to have
an inner sense of what the Orient is all about. Both of these propositions are false.
It is not the thesis of this book to suggest that there is such a thing as a real or true
Orient (Islam, Arab, or whatever); nor is it to make an assertion about the necessary
privilege of an ‘insider’ perspective over an ‘outsider’ one [ . . . ]. On the contrary, I
have been arguing that the ‘Orient’ is itself a constituted identity, and that the notion
that there are geographical spaces with indigenous, radically ‘different’ inhabitants
who can be defined on the basis of some religion, culture, or racial essence proper to
that geographical space is equally a highly debatable idea. I certainly do not believe
the limited proposition that only a black can write about blacks, a Muslim about
Muslims, and so forth.27

His emphasis and defensiveness on this point are so strong that he repeats
it in Culture and Imperialism where he castigates those who “stipulate, for in-
stance, that only Jews can understand Jewish suffering, only formerly co-
lonial subjects can understand colonial experience [ . . . ] [or that a certain
national experience is] comprehensible only to Africans, Iranians, Chinese,
Jews, or Germans [wherein] you first of all posit as essential something
which, I believe, is both historically created and the result of interpreta-
tion—namely the existence of Africanness, Jewishness, or Germanness or
for that matter Orientalism and Occidentalism.”28
This seems like a strange assertion, though it is in line with his third prob-
lematic invocation of Occidentalism as a response to Orientalism by those
Orientalized by it. But what Said discovered in his dissection of Orientalism
was what it entailed about the speaking subject: “Only an Occidental could
speak of Orientals for example, just as it was the White man who could

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 roundtable • Massad

designate and name the coloreds or nonwhites.”29 He added, “The Orientalist

can imitate the Orient without the opposite being true. What he says about
the Orient is therefore to be understood as description obtained in a one-
way exchange: as they spoke and behaved, he observed and wrote down. His
power was to have existed amongst them as a native speaker, as it were, and
also as a secret writer. And what he wrote was intended as useful knowledge,
not for them, but for Europe and its various disseminative institutions.”30
Said’s comments imply that Occidentalism authorizes the understanding
that only Europeans know both the Occident and the Orient (and that they do
so better than its inhabitants do), and that only Europeans can render judg-
ment on Europe and the globe. His later defensiveness seems indeed to take
the sting out of these important conclusions and to open the way for jejune
appropriations of his work by those who, unlike him, are not intellectually
or politically invested in an analysis of Orientalism and Occidentalism as
imperial formations, but are rather politically and intellectually committed
to criticizing resistances to these formations. These appropriations seem
to hold onto the ambiguity arising from both the sometimes problematic
explicit reference to Occidentalism in the book and the logical, and often
implicit, implications of the meaning of Occidentalism that are central to
the arguments of the book. The consequent misunderstanding of the term,
whether deliberate and for the purpose of political expedience, or as an out-
come of Said’s sometimes contradictory deployment of the term, makes it
important to reintroduce the term at the center of Said’s project, indeed as
the lasting legacy of his book.
If Occidentalism as “reverse Orientalism” was posited by the likes of the
Syrian Orientalist intellectual Sadiq Jalal al-’Azm and later by Dutch and
Israeli authors Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, this was done in ways that
are conceptually troubling.31 Buruma and Margalit argue that Occidentalism
is a type of “loathing” of the “West”; that it is “the dehumanizing picture of
the West painted by its enemies”; it is “at least as reductive” as Orientalism;
and that “its bigotry simply turns the Orientalist view upside down.”32 They
insist, however, that the West’s enemies cannot be credited with developing
Occidentalism, for even that loathing of the West “was born in Europe, before
it was transferred to other parts of the world. The West was the source of
the Enlightenment and its secular, liberal offshoots, but also of its frequently
poisonous antidotes.”33 But Orientalism has not been seen or depicted by
Said or any other scholar as a “loathing” of the Orient or everything Oriental,

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 History of the Present

nor has Orientalism been reduced to the view that it is “the Orient as seen
by its enemies” as Buruma and Margalit’s book’s subtitle asserts. Mistaking
Occidentalism as the hatred of the Occident rather than its conjuring up as
a category, however, continues to prevail in the deployment of the term.34
Said’s more radical and assertive propositions about Occidentalism con-
tinue to inform and disturb contemporary scholarship. While some pre-
tend to have learned the lessons the book wanted to impart, they quickly
proceed—consciously or unconsciously—with Orientalist methodology
unperturbed.35 An increasing number of scholars now seem to be invested in
deploying universalism as a cover for Occidentalism or indeed its other name.
This is the case especially in the following areas: the liberal, universalizing,
and globalizing discourses of democracy and human rights, which oppose
themselves to “Oriental despotism” of various chromatisms; discourses of
women’s rights, where the persistence of the “misogyny” of the Orient has
transformed its anthropological objects from foot-binding, sati, and the
harem to “dowry deaths,” “the veil,” and “honor crimes” compared to the
philogyny of the Occident whose women are depicted as “the luckiest in the
world”; and lastly in the discourses of sexual rights, where a “debauched”
Orient and Africa have been replaced with the sexually “repressive” and “ho-
mophobic” Muslims and Africans who oppress homosexuals, compared to
the homophilic Occident that loves both its homosexuals and heterosexuals
equally. It is also the case in the anthropological work of the psychoanalysis
of Islam and the so-called tolerance of the West.36
Scholars making the universalist case define the resistance to liberalism
as Occidentalization on the part of “Orientals.” They do not use Occiden-
talism in the way Buruma and Margalit use it, but instead suggest that any
resistance to adopting its precepts is itself a form of Orientalism, indeed of
“self-Orientalization.”37 Thus analysis that examines how Orientalism and
Occidentalism have Orientalized and Occidentalized the population of the
globe and produced its modern institutions, including its institutions of
sexual regulation and identification, is not presented as a description and an
analysis of the colonial process through which individuals and populations
have been subjectified and subjugated. Rather, such analysis is presented as
a denial of the agency of those who have been Orientalized insofar as their
conditions are said to be the effect of their own actions and not of colo-
nialism—and who also, by sheer chance, according to these scholars, seem
to have produced the very same biopolitical state that emerged in modern

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 roundtable • Massad

Europe, one which by coincidence shares the same sexual ontology and epis-
temology of Europe “coevally” rather than being the outcome of colonialism.
According to these deniers of colonial effects, claiming that colonialism had
such wide-reaching impact becomes either a form of Orientalism if those
undertaking the analysis are “Occidental,” or a form of “self-Orientalization”
if they happen to be “Oriental.”38
For those scholars who are critical of imperial formations, the lasting and
generative impact of Said’s Orientalism has been the proliferation of scholar-
ship on the constitution of “Europe,” the “West,” and their others in a way,
which now accepts as a given, that Orientalism was always already Occidentalism
and Occidentalism was always already Orientalism, but not in the sense that these
are equivalent or even parallel terms, but rather in the sense that each term
presupposes and subtends the other.39 While Said was more comfortable
with anti-identitarian critiques like those of Frantz Fanon than with what
he characterized as reactive “separatist” projects which he rejected, he opted
for a critical humanism that would not be based on Occidentalism and Ori-
entalism—though I believe he had a difficult time defending it conceptually
and politically against critics, let alone shaping it into a positive project.40
This aside, the turn toward interrogating Occidentalism, in the tradition of
Said, is valuable because it enables an ongoing critique of certain ideologi-
cal and methodological operations, foremost among them the hegemonies
of universalism as a cover for Occidentalism and as the core value of the
dominant liberalism. This is the lesson that Said’s Orientalism has imparted
and one that remains central to contemporary and future critical scholarship.

I thank Neville Hoad and Lecia Rosenthal for their valuable and helpful comments on an earlier
draft.

Joseph Massad is Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Co-
lumbia University. He is the author of Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity
in Jordan (Columbia University Press, 2001), The Persistence of the Palestinian Question
(Routledge, 2006) and Desiring Arabs (University of Chicago Press, 2007). His latest
book is Islam in Liberalism (University of Chicago Press, 2015).

Notes
1. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1979), 72.
2. Ibid., 87.
3. Ibid., 253.
4. Ibid., 146.

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 History of the Present

5. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983), 249.
6. Said, Orientalism, 2.
7. Ibid., 3.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 5.
10. Ibid., 50.
11. Ibid., 205.
12. Hasan Hanafi, Muqaddimah fi ‘Ilm al-Istighrab [Introduction to Occidentology]
(1991), 32.
13. Said, Orientalism, 328.
14. Ibid., 3.
15. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993), 319–320.
16. Ibid., xi.
17. Said, Orientalism, 329–352.
18. Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition with A New Preface
by the Author (2003), xxvii–xxviii.
19. Edward W. Said, Freud and the Non-European (2003).
20. For original wording, see notes 6, 7.
21. Said, Orientalism, 204.
22. Ibid., 246–247.
23. Ibid., 247.
24. Ella Shohat, “The Sephardi-Moorish Atlantic: Between Orientalism and Oc-
cidentalism,” in Between the Middle East and the Americas: The Cultural Politics of Diaspora,
ed. Evelyn Alsultani and Ella Shohat (2013), 52.
25. Said, Orientalism, 137.
26. On the question of Semitism, see Joseph Massad, “Forget Semitism!,” in Living
Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Peace and Violence, ed. Elisabeth Weber (2013),
59–79.
27. Said, Orientalism, 322.
28. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 31–32.
29. Said, Orientalism, 228.
30. Ibid., 160.
31. See Sadiq Jalal al-’Azm, “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse,” Khamsin 8
(1980): 5–26.
32. Ian Buruma and Avishait Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its En-
emies (2004), 4, 5.
33. Ibid., 6, 10.
34. Important and recent exceptions to this include Couze Venn, Occidentalism:
Modernity and Subjectivity (2000), where Occidentalism is defined as “the becoming-
West of Europe” (19), and Saree Makdisi’s Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race,
and Imperial Culture (2014), where he uses the term to refer to how the Occident was
conceived in England since the late eighteenth century to Occidentalize England and
the English. Other uses of Occidentalism include Walter D. Mignolo’s use of the term

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 roundtable • Massad

in The Idea of Latin America (2005), where he defines it as the invention of the West
at the time of its conquest of the Americas in 1492, and therefore as a precursor to
Orientalism (34–35).
35. See for example Andrew Shryock, Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination,
Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan (1997), and my review of his book in
the Journal of Palestine Studies, No. 105 (Fall 1997): 103–106.
36. On these ongoing missionary tasks, see my Islam in Liberalism (2015).
37. See for example Dina Al-Kassim, “Epilogue,” in Islamicate Sexualities: Translations
Across Temporal Geographies of Desire, ed. Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi
(2008), 297—339; and Howard Chiang, “Epistemic Modernity and the Emergence of
Homosexuality in China” Gender & History vol. 22 no. 3 (November 2010): 629–57.
38. Lara Deeb and Dina Al-Kassim, “Introduction,” Journal of Middle East Women’s
Studies vol. 7 no. 3 (Fall 2011): 2.
39. The literature on this is enormous. Examples include Robert Bartlett, The
Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization, Cultural Change, 950–1350 (1993), Roger Ballard,
“Islam and the Construction of Europe,” in Muslims in the Margin: Political Responses to
the Presence of Islam in Western Europe, ed. Wasif Shadid and Sjoerd von Koningsveld
(1996), 15–51, Roberto M. Dainotto, Europe (In Theory) (2007), María Rosa Menocal,
“Pride and Prejudice in Medieval Studies: European and Oriental,” Hispanic Review
53, no. 1 (Winter 1985): 61–78. See also María Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Me-
dieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (1987), Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire:
The New World, Islam, and European Identities (2001), Engin F. Isin, “Citizenship after
Orientalism: Ottoman Citizenship,” in Citizenship in a Global World: European Questions
and Turkish Experiences, ed. Fuat Keyman and Ahmet Icduygu (2005), 31–51, Talal
Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (2003).
40. His posthumously published book Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004)
was his last attempt to articulate his position on this.

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