Rasheed El-Enany, London and New York: Routledge, 2006. 255 pages.

In his Orientalism (Vintage Books: 1978), literature teacher and cultural critic Edward Said claimed that the entire corpus of academic, literary, and artistic knowledge about the Orient in general and theMuslim world in particular that the West had accumulated and shaped was built up solely to serve its desire to conquer, control, and subjugate the Orient. His thesis was widely discussed and influenced the study of the Middle East and the attitudes of numerous scholars.According to Said, theWest depicts the Orient as stagnant, static, exotic, submissive, and retarded, in contrast to the supposedly enlightened and superior West.

Some thirty years after the furor caused by this book, Rasheed El-Enany’s Arab Representations of the Occident: East-West Encounters in Arabic Fiction challenges Said’s theory, at least with respect toArabic literature. El-Enany claims that Said only presented the western perspective and ignored the Oriental resistance to it. In response, he presents the East-West encounter through his own eyes, those of anArab intellectual who was born and raised in Cairo and moved to Great Britain in 1977 during his twenties.

His basic premise is that a culture that has produced the likes of himself or its intellectual exponents cannot possibly be anti-western. He shows that the Orient’s perception of the West has not been static, but rather has undergone various changes over time. Even before Napoleon landed on Egyptian soil, Arab intellectuals realized that westerners were the bearers of a culture that differed significantly from that of their former rulers, the Ottomans.

Napoleon came from a different world, a modern world of science, inventions, advanced weaponry and military tactics, human rights, and so on. The Arabs’ paradoxical attitude to the West can be seen in `Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti’s `Aja’ib al-Athar (p. 3), even though this Egyptian historian (1754-1825) never left his homeland and encountered the West only through the French invaders.

At least as far as Arabic prose literature is concerned, the author argues persuasively that the West’s attitude toward the Orient cannot be treated en bloc and that the people of the Orient cannot be described as consistently anti-western. Demonstrating his thesis with quotes from Arabic literature, he claims that a distinction must be made between continents (Europe and the New World), periods (precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial), and the sexes.

Time is also an important dimension by which to measure differences, particularly in theArab world that, after the period of stagnation, experienced significant political, economic, and cultural development. Over the course of time, writers emerged who often expressed the opinions of the societies in which they grew up and presented their own views on events and their causes. El-Enany stresses that every period must be evaluated in terms of its own political character, the way its people develop, and the interrelationships among its states and cultures. Thus writers are not all the same: some are quite pro-western, others are very anti-western, and still others accept the material advances that Europe has to offer but reject its morality.

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