The Center and the Margin in Orientalist Islamic Studies Bernard Lewis as a model

Master Thesis

Student: Ali Jawad Kadom Al- Jubouri

Supervised by:Assistant Professor Dr.
Safaa Hussein Latif Al , Massoudi

Major: Language and literature of the holy Quran

Publish Date: 2023

Download FileClick here


Abstract

This study falls within the field of cultural criticism, based on the reading of the implicit in the discourse, and the migration of the classical approach in text criticism, cultural criticism works to transform the critical reader from a mere cultural creation controlled by closed formats and directing their movement, to an active element and examiner of each text according to strict methodological controls.
This study seeks to uncover the issues of (center) and (margin) in Orientalist thought, and highlight their manifestations in the writings of the Anglo-American orientalist Bernard Lewis, and analyze his Orientalist culture to identify the hidden aspects behind them, and show the underlying ones, which targeted the East in general and Islam in particular, if we note that the center is fixed in a culture in the relative sense of a fixed concept.
This is formed by the consolidation of beliefs, philosophies, customs and traditions, while the margin is what lies outside the periphery of the intellectual circle, it is the thought and discourse of the isolated minority outside the scope of the dominant culture, it is a cultural study that tries to answer many questions, perhaps the most important of which is: How does the West view Islam?
This study represents a critical step that undertakes the central Western discourse, and confronts it with some shocking detection of implicit patterns and bringing them out into the open, as it works on presenting the center and marginal formats in order to undermine the falsity of central Western discourses, and the grand narratives that dominate the Western imaginary, and the Western colonial media machine, which portrays the Muslim (the other) as backward, bloody, violent, with an exclusionary thought, who does not believe in dialogue and coexistence with the opposite, and to show the marginal in the orientalist discourse and reveal what was hidden from it behind the center’s discourses, as the process of Polarization and conflict between the center and the periphery.
The study comes in response to the orientalist central discourse, and to prove that orientalism is only a weapon in the hands of the West, not just science, to impose the hegemony of the Western ego on the Eastern other.

Researcher