Twenty-five years after Edward Said's Orientalism, a whole field of study has developed to analyze and interpret
the denigrating fantasies of the exotic "East" that sustained the colonial mind. But what about the fantasies
of "the West" in the eyes of our self-proclaimed enemies? Those remain largely unexamined and, as Ian
Buruma and Avishai Margalit argue, woefully misunderstood. This groundbreaking investigation into the dreams and
stereotypes of the Western world that fuel hatred in the hearts of Al Qaeda and its ilk argues that the origins
of those dreams lie in the West itself. The anti-Western virus has found a ready host in the Islamic world for
a number of reasons, but it is not native there. The West that these jihadis imagine themselves fighting is the
same menace that has haunted the thoughts of revolutionary groups since the early nineteenth century. Occidentalism
identifies its main oppositions -- the timid, soft bourgeois versus the heroic revolutionary; the machine society
versus the organically knit one of "blood and soil"; the sterile Western mind, all reason and no soul,
versus the "inner life" of the spirit -- and provides a new conceptual framework for understanding them,
as we must to face the world's most pressing issues.
Table of Contents
War Against the West
The Occidental City
Heroes and Merchants
Mind of the West
The Wrath of God
Seeds of Revolution
Notes
Index