The Arab Writes Back

Inspired by, and responding to, The Empire Writes Back, this book fills in the gaps that Edward Said acknowledges to have left out in his masterpiece Orientalism. The book is an engagement with a specific number of stereotypical views about Arabs by Western Orientalists who believe that 'oral Arabic (and indeed any local language of a colonized nation) is 'primitive' - a view grounded in the general tendency on the part of the colonizer to privilege 'writing' over 'orality'. Not only the 'oral', but even the 'writing' of the colonized (written Arabic, for example) is seen as 'fragmented' due to 'intrinsic weaknesses' of the very language itself. And the result of this 'fragmentation' and the 'intrinsic' problem of Arabic itself. Orientalist believe, is the 'natural composition of the following 'unchangeable' traits of the 'Arab mind': 'irrationality'; 'illogicality'; and thereby the incapability of Arabs to represent/speak for themselves through a 'worthy' philosophy or literature. The Arabic novels discussed in the book refute this idea of 'muteness' as they respond to their well-known Western counterparts and write back to Orientalism, to History, to the Canon, and to the Self.