Ibn Warraq is the highly acclaimed author of Why I Am Not a Muslim and Defending the West. He is also the editor of The Origins of the Koran, What the Koran Really Says, Leaving Islam, The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, and Which Koran?.
Description
Preface; Three Tutelary Guiding Lights; Classical Antiquity; Early Christianity to the Seventeenth Century; Indian Orientalists; Western Archaeologists; Empire and Curzon; Edward Said and His Methodology; The Pathological Niceness of Liberals, Antimonies, Paradoxes, and Western Values; Orientals as Collectors; Painting and Sculpture; Occidental Influence on Eastern Art; Nineteenth-Century Orientalist Art; Painters as Writers; John Frederick Lewis; Hegel and the Meaning, Significance, and Influence of Dutch Genre Painting; Charles Cordier: Orientalist Sculptor; Religion, Piety, and Portraits; Oriental and African American Orientalists; Orientalism and Music; Literature and Orientalism.
"Ibn Warraqs critique of Saids thought and work is thorough and convincing, indeed devastating to anyone depending on Saidism. It should force the Saidists to acknowledge the sophistry of their false prophet.”—Middle East Quarterly, reviewed by A.J. Caschetta
“Ibn Warraq has written a brilliant and luminous book of cultural analysis and intellectual history. He reminds us of so many precious things in the West - and of it - that are worth upholding in the face of critics who enjoy Western liberties and denigrate them at the same time. This is more than a demolition of Edward Saids Orientalism: In its own right, it is an exquisite inquiry into the great ideas at play in our world." —Fouad Ajami, professor at The Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies, and author of The Foreigners Gift
“For decades Edward Said enjoyed the best that Western academic life had to offer - international celebrity, plaudits, honors and fame beyond the wildest dreams of most professors - while constantly bashing the history, values, and policies that have made this privileged existence possible. In Defending the West the eminent intellectual Ibn Warraq exposes with razor sharp precision the hypocrisy of Saids writings as well as the perverted academic culture that has made his great success possible. With this important new book Ibn Warraq has once and for all dispatched Orientalism to the dustbin of history." —Efraim Karsh, head of Mediterranean Studies, University of London, and author of Empires of the Sand and Islamic Imperialism: A History