Book description
From the Iranian hostage crisis through the Gulf War and the World
Trade Centre bombing, the West has been haunted by a spectre called
'Islam'. As portrayed by the news media - and by a chorus of
government, academic and corporate experts - 'Islam' is synonymous
with terrorism and religious hysteria. At the same time, Islamic
countries use Islam to justify unrepresentative and often oppressive
regimes.
In this landmark work, for which he has written a new introduction,
one of our foremost public thinkers examines the origins and
repercussions of the media's monolithic images of Islam. Combining
political commentary with literary criticism, Edward Said reveals the
hidden assumptions and distortions of fact that underlie even the most
'objective' coverage of the Islamic world.
Edward Said was born in Jerusalem in 1935. In 1951 he attended a
private preparatory high school in Massachusetts, America and he went on
to study at Princeton University for his BA and at Yale for his MA and
PhD. He became University Professor of English and Comparative
Literature at Columbia University. Said was bestowed with numerous
honorary doctorates from universities around the world and twice
received Columbia's Trilling Award and the Wellek Prize of the American
Comparative Literature Association. He is best known for describing and
critiquing 'Orientalism' and his book on the subject was published in
1978. He died in 2003.
