ABSTRACT
When taking up the theme of Islam and the West, Edward Said’s book Orientalism is an almost obligatory reference. First published in 1978, the book represents a milestone in the field of cultural studies. It triggered ongoing scholarly debates and stimulated the exploration of new avenues of research in fields such as postcolonial and colonial discourse studies. Not that Edward Said’s argument was entirely new. The theme of Islam and the West had a series of predecessors in the decades before Said’s publication. 1 Rather, the outstanding success of Orientalism was due to the particular political, societal and scholarly context in which it appeared. The learned polemic of a “Western scholar with Oriental roots”, was written in the new language of so-called post-structuralist criticism and surfed on the political waves of Third-Worldism.
