The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard

The west's Orientalism -- its construction of the Arab "Other" -- has been exposed, examined and expurgated under the critical theory microscope in recent years yet the issue has acquired renewed urgency in light of the current climate of fear and hysteria about the Islamic world. At the same time post-modern thinkers from Nietzsche onwards have employed the motifs and symbols of the Islamic Orient within an ongoing critique of western modernity, an appropriation which -- this hugely controversial book argues -- runs every risk of becoming a new and subtle form of Orientalism. Examining the work of Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Zizek and of post-modern writers from Borges to Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk, Ian Almond also draws on Muslim thinkers including Akbar S. Ahmed and Bobby S. Sayyid in this timely project. The result is a provocative examination of the effects and implications of this "use" of Islam for both the post-modern project and for Islam itself.