ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a visual-rhetorical analysis of the documentary Sufi Soul: The Mystic Music of Islam, by the acclaimed historian William Dalrymple, to illustrate the recurrent Orientalized presentation of Islam within the context of the good-bad Islam binary. Considering Dalrymple’s documentary a rhetorical site for the analysis of Islamic re/presentations, this study contends that Dalrymple’s presentation of Sufism qualifies to be a comparative cross-cultural endeavor for two reasons: first, the aforementioned documentary seems to present an Eastern ritual tradition (Sufism) to a Western audience; second, Dalrymple’s analysis encompasses an array of Eastern areas that includes different countries/cultures such as Syria, Turkey, Pakistan, India, and Morocco. Drawing from Keith Lloyd’s concept of dichoto-negative argumentation, this chapter argues that the good-bad Islam binary functions as a dichoto-negative argument in Dalrymple’s documentary and offers an either/or choice to the viewers of this documentary that limits the audience’s perception about Islam - that there is either good Islam, which is Sufism, and/or bad Islam, which is pretty much any other cultural practice of Islamic philosophy. Approaching Dalrymple’s either/or dichotomistic re/presentation of Sufism in this documentary as a non-deliberate from of Orientalization, this chapter argues that Dalrymple’ s depiction of Sufism is not devoid of archetypal Muslim representation by a Westerner, and hence, the scope of Said’ s Orientalism lasts up to the present.
