Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies

Edward Said’s Orientalism sparked scholarship on the Western colonial mind’s dangerous “East” mirage. But Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit argue that the “West” is more perilous, and its self-proclaimed enemies’ “West” concept remains largely unexamined and misunderstood.

We usually understand “radical Islam” as purely Islamic, but Buruma and Margalit show that radical Islam owes a primary debt to the West. Al Qaeda and its ilk are revolutionary anti-Western political movements, and the West is the bogeyman that haunts their thinking. This genealogy of the anti-Western worldview repeats oppositions: the heroic revolutionary versus the timid bourgeois; the rootless cosmopolitan; the sterile Western mind; the machine society controlled by insiders; and the organically knit-together society of “blood and soil.”

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