Occidentalism, Avishai Margalit
Occidentalism, Avishai Margalit
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Occidentalism
The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies

Author: Avishai Margalit, Ian Buruma

Narrator: Nigel Patterson

Unabridged: 3 hr 56 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/24/2018


Synopsis

We generally understand "radical Islam" as a purely Islamic phenomenon, but Buruma and Margalit show that while the Islamic part of radical Islam certainly is, the radical part owes a primary debt of inheritance to the West. Whatever else they are, al Qaeda and its ilk are revolutionary anti-Western political movements, and Buruma and Margalit show us that the bogeyman of the West who stalks their thinking is the same one who has haunted the thoughts of many other revolutionary groups, going back to the early nineteenth century. In this genealogy of the components of the anti-Western worldview, the same oppositions appear again and again: the heroic revolutionary versus the timid, soft bourgeois; the rootless, deracinated cosmopolitan living in the Western city, cut off from the roots of a spiritually healthy society; the sterile Western mind, all reason and no soul; the machine society, controlled from the center by a cabal of insiders—often Jews—pulling the hidden levers of power versus an organically knit-together one, a society of "blood and soil." The anti-Western virus has found a ready host in the Islamic world for a number of legitimate reasons, they argue, but in no way does that make it an exclusively Islamic matter.

About Avishai Margalit

Avishai Margalit is an Israeli Professor Emeritus in philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 2006 to 2011, he served as the George F. Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.


Reviews

Goodreads review by محمد on October 20, 2014

هذا الكتاب غربي المزاج والهوى إلى أبعد حد، وهو يتناول مفهوم الاستغراب بأنه "الحركة المعادية للغرب"، وخلاصته أن من يُعادون الغرب إنما يفعلون ذلك لأسباب خاصة بهم وليست كردود فعل على ما قد يكون الغرب اقترفه من جرائم وخطايا، يقول المؤلفان: "ما ندعوه بالاستغراب هو تلك الصورة التي رسمها للغرب أعداؤه، وقد......more

Goodreads review by Murtaza on October 08, 2018

If “Occidentalism” never caught on as a term to describe essentialized views of the West you can blame it on this weak attempt to popularize such a neologism. The point that Western ideas have animated anti-Western movements has been much better made by Pankaj Mishra and even Paul Bergman frankly. T......more