From Orientalism to neo-Orientalism: medial representations of Islam and the Muslim world

The debate on Orientalist representations of Islam and/or Muslims has been rampant in academic literature since Edward Said’s publication of his seminal work Orientalism (1978). The articulation of this discourse however has transformed in due course. It has manifested into its new variant ‘neo-Orientalism’, which has gained prominence in the post-9/11 era. In this paper, I discuss the transition from Orientalism to neo-Orientalism, and argue that this new mode of representation does not exclusively result from the 9/11 events and the subsequent War on Terror, but also from the portrayals of Muslims in the last quarter of the twentieth century. These portrayals, disseminated with great intensity by people in the media, journalists, politicians, and Orientalist academics, as well as in literary and cultural productions, continue to reify narratives about Islam and Muslim societies. This paper concludes with the dynamics Orientalism holds and reveals the role authors of the Middle East and South Asia play in disseminating neo-Orientalist discourses with the often-detrimental effect of catering to and promoting modern-day Islamophobia in contemporary Western societies. This is briefly illustrated on the examples of Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), Qaisra Shahraz’s The Holy Woman (2001), and Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing (2003).