East – [سي نجيب]

Article paru dans Wildcat, no. 13, Summer/Autumn 1989, p. 5-6

And it shall come to pass that I will put thee in the cleft of the rock, and I shall take away my hand, and thou shalt see my back parts.
(God, Exodus XXXIII).

Left Wing Reaction in Britain.

The anti-racist theme of the Satanic Verses gives the lie to those who say that Muslim reaction to the book in Britain is a reaction against racism. It goes without saying that people who call for the banning of an anti-religious and anti-racist novel are as reactionary and dangerous as right-wing Christian scum who prosecute gay newspapers. This includes Bernie Grant, Keith Vaz and other Labour MPs. These people are the allies of the Islamic leaders, who defend a reactionary set of social relations which oppress women, divide the working class, and imprison children who happen to be born of Asian parents in a cultural ghetto, when their interests are in breaking out and becoming integrated into the rest of the working class. Multiculturalism is just another racist ideology.

Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm : Orientalism and orientalism in reverse

Article de Sadik Jalal al-‘Azm paru dans Khamsin. Journal of Revolutionnary Socialists of the Middle East, 8, 1981, p. 5-26

PART I. ORIENTALISM

In his sharply debated book, (1) Edward Said introduces us to the subject of ‘Orientalism’ through a broadly historical perspective which situates Europe’s interest in the Orient within the context of the general historical expansion of modern bourgeois Europe outside its traditional confines and at the expense of the rest of the world in the form of its subjugation, pillage, and exploitation. In this sense Orientalism may be seen as a complex and growing phenomenon deriving from the overall historical trend of modern European expansion and involving: a whole set of progressively expanding institutions, a created and cumulative body of theory and practice, a suitable ideological superstructure with an apparatus of complicated assumptions, beliefs, images, literary productions, and rationalisations (not to mention the underlying foundation of commercial, economic and strategic vital interests). I shall call this phenomenon Institutional Orientalism.