Abstract
In one of the two major Arabic critiques of Edward Said’s theory of Western Orientalism, Aziz al-Azmeh argued that the representation of the cultural and religious Other had not been exclusive to the modern Europeans on whom Said had chiefly focused. Azmeh examined medieval Arabic literature and geography and showed that it too had developed a discourse about the Other, a discourse “similar to orientalism” in its representation of the barbarians of Europe, Africa, and other parts of the “unknown” world.1 Representations of other peoples, he explained, are not exclusive to the Western mediation of the Orient, but are inherent in any approach that one society develops about another: “States, civilizations and cultures expend much energy, not commensurate with size, in fixing moral boundaries, consolidating their difference from outsiders, and otherwise encircling themselves with frontiers impermeable to the exotic; and this energy intensifies in circumstances of commotion, instability and conflict, turning to a frenzy of positive hostility most dramatically represented by theoretical and practical racism.”2 For Al-Azmeh, representation of other peoples was not necessarily part of a colonial (as Said had argued) but of a human discourse. All societies, Occidental as well as Oriental, European as well as Arab, essentialize the Other through a system of dichotomization and representation.
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Notes
Aziz al-Azmeh, al-Arab wa-al Barabira (London: Riyad al-Rayyis, 1991).
Sadik Jalal al-’Azm, “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse,” Khamsin, 8 (1981): 5–26.
For the term, istighrab, see Ahmad al-Sheikh in Hiwar al-Istishraq wa-al-Istighrab (Beirut: al-Markaz al-Arabi lil-Dirasat al-Gharbiyah, 1999) and the review in al-Hayat by Atef Madhhar (20 June, 1999), 23.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), 328.
Wang Ning, “Orientalism and Occidentalism,” New Literary History, 28 (1997): 57–67, at 63.
Anouar Majid, Unveiling Traditions (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 98, 35.
Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1994), 55.
The unit in Albert Mas on the representation of the “Turks” in Spanish thought includes discussions ofTurkish “cruauté; La cupidité; L’ivrognerie et la gloutonnerie; Orgueil, jactance et couardise; La ruse, la fourberie et la manque de parole; La lascivité; La sodomie,” Les Turks dans la littérature espagnole du siècle d’or (Paris: Centre de recherches hispaniques, 1967), vol. 2. See also William Wistar Comfort, “The Literary Role of the Saracens in the French Epic,” PMLA, 55 (1940), 628–59, at 650 and “The Saracens in Italian Epic Poetry,” PMLA, 59 (1944): 882–911. For studies on the image of the Moor in European thought, see
Maria Soledad Carrasco Urgoiti, El Moro de Granada en la Literature (del Siglo XV al XX) (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1956, repr. 1989);
Brandon Beck, From the Rising of the Sun: English Images of the Ottoman Empire to 1715 (NewYork: Peter Lang, 1987);
Samuel Chew, The Crescent and the Rose (repr. NewYork: Octagon Books, 1965);
Clarence Dana Rouillard, The Turk in French History, Thought, and Literature (1520–1660) (Paris: Ancienne Librarie Furne, 1941);
Jack D’Amico, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (Tampa: University of South Florida Press, 1991); and my Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), chapters 4 and 5.
See my “The Toleration of Muslims in Renaissance England: Practice and Theory,” in Religious Toleration from Cyrus to Defoe: The Variety of Rites, ed. John C. Laursen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999): 127–47.
Alain Grosrichard, The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1998).
Tarif Khalidi, The Muslim Jesus: Sayings and Stories in Islamic Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001). For a “fundamentalist” Muslim view of Jesus, see
Mohammad Mitwalli al-Sha’arawi, Maryam wa-al Masih (Cairo: Maktabat al-Turath al-Islami, 1999).
See the summary of these books in L. P. Harvey, The Literary Culture of the Moriscos, 1492–1609 (D. Phil. Dissertation: Oxford University, 1958), 241ff.
See the detailed study of Jesus and Mary in Morisco thought in Mikel de Epalza, Jésus Otage (Paris: Cerf, 1987), chapter III, “L’image islamique de Jésus.”
For studies of Christian residence in Morocco, see Abd al-Hadi Ben Mansour, “Les immigrés européens à Alger et le lobby francais au XVII Siècle,” Majallat el-Tarikh, 21 (1986): 27–47;
Youssef Courbage and Philippe Faragues, Christians and Jews Under Islam, trans. Judy Mabro (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), 39;
Andrew C. Hess, The Forgotten Frontier: A History of the Sixteenth-Century Ibero-African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (NewYork: Routledge, 2000), 293–305.
The Moriscos described Christians as “Pharoahs” and “dogs against Truth,” “Pestiferous Cerebrus” and “eaters of pork,” translated in Anwar Chejne, Islam and the West (Albany: State University of NewYork Press, 1983), 25. See also the references to Christians as “dogs” in a letter of 7 December, 1581,
Abd al-Jelil Temimi, “Munawarat li-khittat isyaan bil-Andalus sanat 1582,” al-Majala al-Tarikhiyyah al-Magharibiyya, 95 (1999): 671–90, at 685–6; al-Maqqari’s analogy between the Ruum (the Christians) and dogs:
Azhar ar-Riyad, ed. Mustapha as-Saqa (Rabat: Sunduq al-Turath al-Islami, 1978), 1:107. The dog is an unclean animal in Islam.
Abd al-Latif bin Muhammad al-Hamid, Mawqif al-Dawla al-Othmaniya tijah ma’sat al-Muslimeen fi al-Andalus, 1486–1609 (Riyadh: Al-Humayd, 1993).
Kitab Nasir al-Din ala ‘I Qawm al-Kafirin’, ed. and trans. P. S. Van Koningsveld et al. (Madrid: Al-Majlis al-Ala lil-Abhath al-Ilmiyah, 1997), especially chapters 6–9.
Quoted in G. A. Wiegers, “The Andalusi Heritage in the Maghreb: The Polemical Work of Muhammad Alguazir,” in Poetry, Politics and Polemics, ed. Otto Zwarjes et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996), 107–32, at 125.
Mohammad bin abd al-Waham al-Ghassani, Rihlat al Wazir fi iftikak al-Asir, ed. Alfrid al-Bustani (Tanger: Muassast al-Jinral Franco, 1940); see my forthcoming translation of this account “In the Lands of the Christians”: Arabic Travel Writing in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2002).
Quoted in Henri de Castries, Moulay Ismail et Jacques II (Paris: E. Leroux, 1903), 62.
Los Documentos Arabes Diplomaticos del Archivo de la Corona de Aragon, ed. and trans. Maximiliano Al Alarcon y Santon and Ramon Garcia de Linares (Madrid: E. Maestre, 1940), 394, 396.
Dario Cabanelas Rodriguez, “Cartas de Ahmad al-Mansur a Felipe II,” Al-Andalus, 23 (1958): 19–47, at 31.
Public Record Office (London), SP 71/17/43. The word was also used in Algerian letters to the French: “pour l’amour de nous,” “pour l’amour deVotre Majesté,” in Correspondance des Deys D’Alger, ed. Eugène Plantet (Paris: F.Alcan, 1889), 2:15 (4 October, 1701), 2:10 (9 May, 1720).
For the relation of book printing and empire, see John Parker, Books to Build an Empire (Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1965).
Harvey J. Graff, The Legacies of Literacy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 124.
Henri Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 266. See also
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Communication and Cultural Transformation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 303.
Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 31, 83–6.
Percy G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660–1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962).
Harold Love, Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 179–80.
Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory (London:Verso, 1997), 159.
The first Arabic press was established not in Marrakesh but in Istanbul in 1712 (earlier there had been a shortlived press in Aleppo during 1706–11), but it produced so few books that by the end of the century, there was no more than a score published. For the history of the press, see Wahid Qaddurah, Le début de l’imprimerie Arab à Istanbul et en Syrie: Evolution de l’environment culturel (1706–1787) (Tunis: Markaz al-Dirasat wa al-Buhuth, 1993). For the number and tides of printed books, see
Abu al-Futuh Radwan, Tarikh Matba’at Bulaq (Cairo: Al-Matbaah al-Amiriyah, 1953), 10–15.
Henri de Castries, Moulay Ismail et Jacques II (Paris: E. Leroux, 1903), 2.
Mercure Galant, (February 1699), 241. See the study of the ambassador’s journey in Eugene Plantet, Mouley Ismael Empereur du Maroc et la Princesse De Conti (Paris: Librarie Plon, 1912).
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© 2003 Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren
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Matar, N.I. (2003). The Question of Occidentalism in Early Modern Morocco. In: Ingham, P.C., Warren, M.R. (eds) Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980236_8
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