Author/Authors
gran, peter temple university, USA
Title Of Article
The Rise of the West or the Rise of the Rich: The Question of an Alternative to Orientalism
شماره ركورد
44597
Abstract
Any conference about Rifa‘at Abou-el-Haj must begin and end by making the point that Middle East Studies is in a state of crisis. This was Rifa‘at’s insight; his life has been spent attempting to overcome this crisis. What he noticed many years ago was that wherever one looks, scholars writing on the Middle East are for no particular scientific reason defining their subject matter in relation to the West, the West being taken as the standard or norm. The question he often asked was why are they doing it. Here recent research suggests that scholars in Middle East Studies do not have much of a choice in terms of what they are doing. They are trapped in a particular meta-narrative called the Rise of the West. One part of this metanarrative postulates a rising West, another part the stagnation of an Orient; and it is this latter context in which modern Middle East studies functions.
From Page
49
JournalTitle
The Journal Of Ottoman Studies
To Page
56
JournalTitle
The Journal Of Ottoman Studies
Link To Document