Abstract

This presentation aims at providing a clear description of this book to encourage returning to it in order to translate into Arabic, study and critically evaluate it, by interested scholars, and place it within the framework of new orientalist studies. This work includes a brief review of Ian Almond's book, The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault to Baudrillard, published for the first time in 2007. It introduces, in the beginning, the author, his field of work and research interests and his major books in English, comparative, and post-colonial literature, as well as Islam, and its relationship particularly with the West. Then, it describes the subject of the book, namely western orientalism, and the process of its construction of the Arab and Muslim worlds, through a careful and critical perspective. The book closely examines the works of Nietzsche, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Kristeva, and Cicek; in addition to the novels of Borges, Rushdie, and Pamuk, taking them not as critics, but through their discourses that use the East and deals with Islam and draw their images across a growing modernist orientalist line. The author attempts to explore the implicit meanings of this use in relation to the modern project and to Islam itself, based on the ideas of some specialists in the field of modernity and Islamic studies, in light of the western climate filled with fear and mistrust towards the Arab and Islamic worlds. The author seeks to prove that critics of modernity are drawing, through their looks, a new line of orientalism. After examining in detail, the ideas of these critical thinkers, he believes that the European goals have not ended, but they have moved to a new stage, despite the hidden presence of the traditional orientalist tendency. Finally, he calls for studying Islam within its historical context, and the Islamic movements in relation to western liberalism, because ultimately it is the other side of that ideology.