Saturday, October 17, 2009

from Edward Said's Covering Islam

There is from the beginning of the introduction to the Vintage Edition (1997) of Edward Said's Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (1981) :

There also seems to have been a strange revival of canonical, though previously discredited, Orientalist ideas about Muslim, generally non-white people -- ideas which have achieved a startling prominence at a time when racial or religious misrepresentations of every other cultural group are no longer circulated with such impunity. Malicious generalizations about Islam have become the last acceptable form of denigration of foreign cultures in the West; what is said about the Muslim mind, or character, or religion, or culture as a whole cannot now be said in mainstream discussions about Africans, Jews, other Orientals, or Asians.

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