The Impact of Current Events on Western Literature’s Portrayal of the Middle East and North Africa Region
Literature has always been the product of its surrounding ideological and intellectual movements. Whether depicted in The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri in the fourteenth century or War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy in 1869, the fashionable ideas of the time influenced these writings. For centuries, one framework had inspired literature and even became a justification for the world of empires after the eighteenth century: Orientalism.
In 1979, Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said defined the concept of Orientalism as the “institution for dealing with the Orient – dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it.” In short, Orientalism was a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient." However, this definition raises several questions: What is the Orient? What is the West? And most importantly of all, how does Orientalism apply to the world of today?
The Orient and the West are terms describing distinct geographical and cultural areas of the world, existing under a structuralist framework. In other words, the Orient is the amalgamation of Asian cultures, and the West is the amalgamation of European cultures. It is important to note that these definitions are not rigid. Although it was not originally considered “Western,” American culture became categorized under this label in the late eighteenth century. The Orient, in particular, is a creation of Western literature, and therefore changes as often as literary trends do.
Western literature portraying non-European cultures became widespread during the Crusades, when Catholics wrote about the “otherness” of the Muslims they would encounter. Subsequently, the Islamic world known as Dar-al-Islam(House of Islam) and Central Asian countries closer to Europe became a spectacle to write about. In European minds, this foreign region was “barbaric” and “uncivilized”, because if Catholics were the opposite of them, it would follow that their virtues alike were opposite. These virtues, such as objectivity, impartiality, and rationality, developed as Europeans expanded across Asia into India, China, and Southeast Asia. Across the continent, their assumed superiority justified colonialism, and eventually imperialism, as the world became one of empires in the nineteenth century. Simultaneously, the Orient had expanded, and Orientalist literature followed the literary trends of the time. Romantic-era writers turned the Orient into an exotic and mysterious land pitted against the rational West.
The era of decolonialism and globalization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries compelled the collapse of the Oriental framework, but its ideologies did not disappear. Today, Western literature can be described as following Neo-Oriental ideology, which “continues to essentialise the East—particularly the Islamic world—but often under the guise of liberal values such as democracy, women’s rights, secularism, and human rights.”
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 and subsequent War on Terror ushered in this new wave of Neo-Orientalism, which continues to influence Western literature, media, and conceptions of Asia, particularly the Middle East and North Africa region. Previously, the West was overt about its assumed superiority over Eastern cultures. This has shifted toward a focus on Islam. Western countries label the religion as oppressive, and Muslims find themselves reduced to offensive stereotypes anchored on violence, terrorism, extremism, and oppression. Additionally, Islam is often conflated with authoritarian regimes and receives a bad reputation because of it. These reductive frameworks of thinking overlook the diverse cultures and differences between the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa regions. For example, an American influenced by American news channels might believe that all Arabs are Muslims because they conflate the culture with the religion; this would marginalize other groups like Arab Christians.
While this type of thinking is not used to justify imperialism as it once was, the ideology absolutely can cause harm. This type of ignorance, stemming from the teachings of North American and European news publications, social media, scholarly work, and novels, has caused a rise in anti-Muslim violence over the past few decades. These misconceptions and conflated teachings have also led to politics that tend to be hostile toward Muslim-majority countries and Muslims in Western countries. One example is the 2011 Face Covering ban in France that is still in effect to this day, which targets Muslim women by not allowing them to wear hijabs in public.
Recent events have perpetuated the Neo-Oriental influence in Western literature. Two ongoing conflicts, the Israel-Palestine war and U.S-Iran conflict, continue to shape how people from the Western world see and portray the Middle East. In their eyes, this region is strictly composed of instability, conflict, religious violence, etc; while these are all pressing issues in the region, the idea that they can not coexist with fruitful, diverse, and peaceful societies undermines the attempts of a post-structuralism movement to deconstruct the East-West binary. Western media and literature must abandon practices like selective reporting and stereotypical characters in order for society to forfeit our tendencies to resort to biases and prejudices about cultures that are not our own.