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Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor’s Foreword
- 1 From Tahrir to Terror: Neo-Orientalism and the ‘Arab Spring’
- 2 The Arab Uprisings and the Western Literary Market
- 3 Precarity Far and Near: The Arab Uprisings in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Par le feu and Jonas Lüscher’s Frühling der Barbaren
- 4 Affective Masculinity and the Arab Uprisings: Adam Thirlwell’s Kapow! and Jochen Beyse’s Rebellion
- 5 Figurations of Terror: The Islamist Rage Boy in Karim Alrawi’s Book of Sands and Mathias Énard’s Rue des voleurs
- 6 The Arab Uprisings between Inequality, Insecurity and Identity
- References
- Index
1 - From Tahrir to Terror: Neo-Orientalism and the ‘Arab Spring’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 August 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editor’s Foreword
- 1 From Tahrir to Terror: Neo-Orientalism and the ‘Arab Spring’
- 2 The Arab Uprisings and the Western Literary Market
- 3 Precarity Far and Near: The Arab Uprisings in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Par le feu and Jonas Lüscher’s Frühling der Barbaren
- 4 Affective Masculinity and the Arab Uprisings: Adam Thirlwell’s Kapow! and Jochen Beyse’s Rebellion
- 5 Figurations of Terror: The Islamist Rage Boy in Karim Alrawi’s Book of Sands and Mathias Énard’s Rue des voleurs
- 6 The Arab Uprisings between Inequality, Insecurity and Identity
- References
- Index
Summary
We, looking back on these events, see them through the perspective of our hard-won knowledge, and understand that the practice of extreme violence, known by the catch-all and often inexact term terrorism, was always of particular attraction to male individuals who were either virgins or unable to find sexual partners. Mind-altering frustration, and the damage to the male ego which accompanied it, found its release in rage and assaults. When lonely, hopeless young men were provided with loving, or at least desirous, or at the very least willing sexual partners, they lost interest in suicide belts, bombs and the virgins of heaven, and preferred to live. In the absence of the favourite pastime of every jinni, human males turned their thoughts to orgasmic endings. Death, being readily available everywhere, was often an alternative pursuit to unavailable sex.
In Two Years Eight Months & Twenty-Eight Nights (2015), a fantasy set in the future, Salman Rushdie imagines a war between reason and religion – and uses hyperbolic irony to criticise a fundamentalist interpretation of both. Tinged by this irony, the novel’s elucidation of terrorism mimics – by relying on stereotypes itself – the often-reductive representation not just of Islamist terrorism, but of the Islamicate Other more generally. In this – albeit ironic – reliance on negative framings of the Islamicate Other, the text’s representational approach is no exception on the Western literary market. In fact, and as this book argues, with few exceptions, the dependence on reductive sexualised and securitised modes of representing the Islamicate Other can frequently be found even in literature marketed as open-minded and cosmopolitan; in contrast, fundamental reframings in different contexts of meaning are much rarer.
What holds true for the literary market is a phenomenon which by far transcends the realm of fiction. Despite the existence of, for instance journalistic, attempts to provide a more nuanced picture, negative framings of the Islamicate Other mostly attract greater attention. From Donald Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’ to Renaud Camus’ Great Replacement theory to hate speech against alleged ‘rapefugees’: since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the vilification of the Islamicate Other as a threat to the West has sharply intensified in public discourse.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Literary Neo-Orientalism and the Arab UprisingsTensions in English, French and German Language Fiction, pp. 1 - 32Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2022