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The Fallacy of Neo-orientalism and the Risk of Imperialism:
How American Politics Mobilize Novelists
Mubarak Altwaiji
a
and Ebrahim Alwuraafi
b
a
English Language Skills Department, Northern Border University, Arar, Saudi Arabia;
b
Department of
English Language and Literature, Al Baha University, AL Baha, Saudi Arabia
ABSTRACT
The Muslim world has been plagued by imperial interests, cultural
ravaging and plundering, unequal partnership with the West.
However, since the September 11, 2001 (9/11) attacks, the Arab
world has moved to the center of political and cultural debates
and attracted the major number of representations in American
writings. These writings form a new phenomenon called neo-
orientalism and revolve around a major theme: Muslim Arabs as
victims of fundamentalist dogma. This study explores the ways in
which neo-orientalism developed and was communicated to the
reader in the United States after 9/11. The literature on this
phenomenon is limited; therefore, there exists a need for the study
of neo-orientalism through contemporary fictions that deal
directly with Arab-American relationship. This study also
investigates the assumption implicit in the conception that
contemporary American novel is in solidarity with the state
ignoring its imperial ambitions and its saturation with hegemonic
practices. In response to the terrorist attacks, novel has been one
of the most effective genres to represent the feelings of the nation
and the concern of the country. This part of the study will refer to
different attitudes and political orientations of novelists, which
allow novel to follow the mainstream politics and do not grapple
with the hegemonic interests.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 29 May 2020
Revised 30 September 2020
Accepted 27 November 2020
KEYWORDS
Neo-orientalism;
imperialism; Arabs; the
United States; American
novel
Introduction
In 2008, Sherry Jones said that the Middle East, its people and its religion are new to her
and she feels disturbed by the ways Muslim women are treated: “As a feminist, I was dis-
turbed by these reports and I wanted to learn more. I knew very little about Middle East-
ern culture or Islam at the time”(Jones 2008, 355–356). Within a year, she wrote two
major contributions to neo-orientalism: The Jewel of Medina (2008) and its sequel The
Sword of Medina (2009); both are on the personal life of Prophet Mohammed and his
wives. This was not the first time that an American writer with a little knowledge
about the Arab world wrote voluminous narrative books on Arabs, Islam and Arabic cul-
ture. Having minimal information to produce the knowledge, post-9/11 neo-orientalists
believe that the legacy of classic orientalism sits easily with their agendas and they are
inherently knowledgeable about the East. Furthermore, in a world in which imperialism
© 2021 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
CONTACT Mubarak Altwaiji mubarak2006ye@gmail.com
INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT
2021, VOL. 11, NO. 2, 190–209
https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2021.1924069
is not abhorred, it is easier to situate literature in the larger framework of the neo-imper-
ial agendas and live with a vision of the past which presents the Arabs as perpetrators
rather than victims. Therefore, like it or not, the imperial legacy of classic orientalism
continues to pervade contemporary American writers. It is in books’titles. It is in politi-
cal debates. It is reflected in people’s attitude towards the Easterners and others who look
like them.
Few important aspects of neo-orientalism have been as unconsidered as the contri-
bution made by American politicians to post-9/11 American literary canon and its hid-
den imperial attitude, in spite of the fact that contemporary American writers rejoice in
their self-proclaimed literature as unbiased literature. The American administration
made it explicit that provisioning new realities in all aspects of American culture was cru-
cial for understanding the complexity of post-9/11 American-Arab relationship (Semaan
2014, 27). Many political writers link the events of 9/11 to the basic Islamic teachings and
Arabic culture. This literature has increasingly focused on superiority-inferiority and
civility-incivility dynamics of nations, while the debates on targeting the terror have lar-
gely dried up. Indeed, today a reader is forgiven for thinking that post-9/11 American
literature has been more of a political rather than a scholarly orientation as the orientalist
past has been buried under volumes of literary works produced by ambitious politicians.
In order to investigate the range of imperialist attitudes in contemporary American
novel, we selected four post-9/11 American novels: Sherry Jones’The Jewel of Medina
(2008; sometimes cited in text as The Jewel), Tom Clancy’sThe Teeth of the Tiger
(2003; sometimes cited in text as The Teeth), Richard A. Clarke’sThe Scorpion’s Gate
(2005; sometimes cited in text as The Scorpion’s) and Joel C. Rosenberg’sThe Last
Jihad (2002). In addition, the theoretical part of the study is based on some pivotal
aspects of a study titled “Neo-orientalism and the Neo-imperialism Thesis”published
by Arab Studies Quarterly in 2014.
Neo-orientalism: A Post-9/11 Imperial Phenomenon?
One of the main aims of this study is to investigate that since the publication of
Orientalism in 1978, the position of Arabs, their culture and their religion have chan-
ged dramatically and moved to the center of American literature, politics and intel-
lectual debates. Several incidents such as bombings of US embassies in many
countries such as Kenya, Tanzania, Lebanon, Kuwait and Uganda, the Oklahoma
bombing and the 9/11 attacks have put the Middle East in a quite new position.
Most of these terrorist acts have been targeting the United States in the name of
Islam. Furthermore, the 9/11 events and the American retaliations have firmly estab-
lished numerous problematic images and have allowed the rapprochement between
literature and politics without grappling with interests and ideologies. Since 9/11, doz-
ens of books have engendered a lot of controversy about the American retaliation
focusing their critique on the causes of the attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon and located the roots of the hatred as an inseparable issue from
the American geopolitical hegemony. This study therefore attempts to augment
neo-orientalism’s increasing preoccupation with an inconclusive debate and the
unending campaign on terror with a coherent summary of the effective factors that
helped neo-orientalism exist:
INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT 191
We live in a world still under the shadow of George Bush’s War on Terror—perhaps better
understood as a War of Terrorisms. The dominant popular image here is of terrorism as the
unjustifiable, seemingly inexplicable, actions of inhuman individuals, perhaps in the shape
of Palestinian suicide bombers, or murderous groups, such as Al Qaeda. Routinely missing
from this picture is the question of state terrorism. (Williams 2010, 90)
The social and political responses to 9/11 attacks have become intertwined with the
huge changes in literature on the Muslims and mainly the Arabs (Samiei 2010, 1148).
Analysis in this study borrows the concept of hegemony from Antonio Gramsci’s seminal
work Selections from the Prison Notebook (1971) and concept of power-knowledge
relationship from Michel Foucault’sPower/knowledge (1980). The dominant image of
the Arabs and Islam can better be understood through the two concepts; hegemony
and power-knowledge relationship. Gramsci notes that hegemonic knowledge is created
to represent the interests of the superior classes and serves to introduce their values and
norms to the subordinate classes. It is the superior formation that functions as the med-
ium between “intellectual and non-intellectual”and “between the rulers and the ruled,
élites and their followers”(Gramsci 1971, 666). Gramsci’s association of knowledge
with hegemony explains the orientalist binary opposition between the progressive
West and the backward East that is seen as unable to be an agent of its own development.
This aspect of relationship assumes “an educational relationship”that “occurs not only
within a nation, between the various forces of which the nation is composed, but in
the international and world-wide field, between complexes of national and continental
civilizations”(Gramsci 1971, 666). These superior beliefs and styles are created by the
American intellectual elites of the dominant class, and result in shaping the structure
of a life-style that is imposed by civil society rather than by the state. Michel Foucault’s
investigation of the relationship between power and knowledge complements Gramsci’s
thesis perfectly. According to Foucault, both power and knowledge have equal effect to
play on one another:
We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it
because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge
directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative consti-
tution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute
at the same time power relations. (Foucault 1980, 27)
When looking at how post-9/11 neo-orientalist concepts function with respect to
approaching the Muslims, it is necessary to go back to Chomsky’s views in Hegemony
or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance (2003) that “[t]he basic principle is
that hegemony is more important than survival”(Chomsky 2003, 125). Hegemony,
according to Chomsky, does not only aim at achieving national security but also protect-
ing the interest of the powerful companies through turning rich countries in the Middle
East “into a private American oil pumping station”(Chomsky 2003, 68). However, the
major updates on orientalist discourse are not the result of the attacks and the American
retaliations alone. Different strategies on international level followed what the American
administration believed to be an appropriate method for dealing with the perpetrators
and the culture they belong to. This ambitious policy, known as grand strategy, aims
at undertaking a coercive assertion of American superior position in global politics
and is also the step to global hegemony.
1
Under the influence of the grand strategy
192 M. ALTWAIJI AND E. ALWURAAFI
influence, most of the Arab leaders had to face the reality that they were either with or
against the American definition of terrorism:
We failed as the Muslim world to explain that there is no such thing as radical Islam. . . .
[W]ar against “radical Islam”started, rather than Muslim leaders trying to explain to the
West that there is no such thing as radical Islam. (Khan 2019)
The military actions in different parts of the Arab countries, in addition to Iraq, Yemen
and Sudan, are legitimized on the assumption that Arab societies need to be civilized.
The American administration mobilizes whatever means deemed convenient to find a
pretext under which civilizing the Arab world shall take place: “the neo-conservative
agenda has strengthened these negative stereotypes to justify its foreign policy in the
Middle East”(Bahramitash 2005, 223). Such approach towards the East implies an expla-
nation of political hegemony, which replaces that of economic interests when defining
imperialism as a basic component of US policies and a quality embedded in its cultures.
This new imperialism has become interwoven with the neo-orientalist ideas, themes and
images, emphasizing the fact that there is no dual approach to deal with the East, because
both neo-orientalist institutions and official US policies represent the supreme interest of
the state. Grand strategy offered Bush’s administration the “full spectrum dominance,”
the authority to invade countries such as Iraq without the approval of the United
Nations.
2
Under the influence of such factors, American orientalism, a basic component of clas-
sic orientalism, no longer deals with the geographic map of classical orient: Arab and
non-Arab countries of the East. Thanks to the grand strategy, orientalism undergoes
compression and neo-orientalism emerges with new themes. The United States responses
to 9/11 focus on a “clear understanding of the world beyond US borders, for the simple
reason that US interest in the Middle East is now, more than ever, more a part of dom-
estic politics than it is a part of foreign politics”(Colla 2003, 121). Neo-orientalism,
according to Altwaiji (2014), is not a new phenomenon but an update to the whole con-
stituents of orientalism: the subject, the image and the geography:
neo-orientalism, a style of representation that, while indebted to classical orientalism,
focuses on “othering”the Arab world with the exclusion of some geographic parts, like
India and Turkey, from the classical map of orientalism. Although neo-orientalism rep-
resents a shift in the selection of its subject and locale, it nonetheless reproduces certain rep-
etitions of and conceptual continuities with its precursor. Like classical orientalism, neo-
orientalism is a monolithic discourse based on binarism between the superior American
values and the inferior Arab culture. (Altwaiji 2014, 313)
Although there are disagreements on the definition of neo-orientalism, most scholarly
studies show a consensus about two basic trends that emerged as a response to the post-9/
11 dramatic changes on a global level. The first feature is that sticking to the rudimentary
basics of classic/traditional orientalism has ceased to function and becomes relegated to
the past. All post-9/11 writings on the East are post-orientalism with much focus on
Arabs and their religion. After 9/11 terrorist attacks, American scholars and politicians
quickly reversed their opinions and hypotheses on the interrelation between state and
religion in the context of the Arab world. Contrary to classic orientalists who believed
that dictators of Arab states are stronger than religious fanatics, such an assumption wit-
nesses a dramatic change after 9/11. The second feature, however, holds that, although
INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT 193
several factors which were responsible for shaping the classic orientalism are different, it
would be naive to consider that the East vs. West notion which shaped classic orientalism
no longer exists. Typical East–West dualism does not play any part in neo-orientalism.
However, new terminology is reconstituted to build a new paradigm called neo-orient-
alism. Though a considerable amount of research has been produced on representation
of Islam in post-9/11 American novel, few scholars have tried to study neo-orientalism as
a product of two strains of contemporary fields of knowledge: literature and post-9/11
political agendas.
Contemporary American Novel: Embracing Imperialism?
If international relationships and politics changed after the 9/11 events, cultural relation-
ships and perceptions of nations also changed, and therefore, American novel of this
period is a reflection of its political context and social feelings (Sanderson and Nikitin
2006, 33). American writers of this era struggle to situate the national concerns and
obsessions in the track of history and introduce new ways in which events and political
contexts influence narrative writing and production of meanings. Therefore, neo-orient-
alism is a major post-9/11 American cultural change that resulted mainly from the ter-
rorist attacks and the American retaliations to them. Both acts created a major topic for
national novel called war on terror and brought the Arab world and the classic orientalist
discriminatory division of “us”and “them”to the scene again. Therefore, encountering
Arabs and their religion becomes a more prevalent theme in contemporary American
novel; such a task not only demands a fight against radical thoughts but also dedicates
collective effort for keeping all the Muslims under careful observation. These views,
including American obsessions spanning different fields of political and cultural studies,
assume that Arabs and their religion are a threat to the West.
With anti-Muslim sentiment increasing in both politics and, latterly, culture, it has
become an issue of urgency for narrative writers to make fuller sense of Islam and Islamic
culture. One such high-profile contribution to neo-orientalist narratives and the debates
around the aggressive nature of Islamic culture is Sherry Jones’sThe Jewel of Medina
(2008). The post-9/11 American narrative, according to Spencer and Valassopoulos, is
“one such dogma”that is “credited with the unimpeachable authority of divine scripture”
(Spencer and Valassopoulos 2010, 331). This deployment of hegemonic representations
helps to privilege a hegemonic war that is “imperialistic in nature”and “so profound”in
“its militant certainty and its sense of mission”(Spencer and Valassopoulos 2010, 331).
Tariq Ali calls such fiction fundamentalist narratives which are, according to him, tainted
by proliferation of imperialist attitudes, radical images and their openness to repetitive
divergent interpretations (Ali 2002). This influence of neo-orientalist thoughts on narra-
tives is always linked tightly to imperialist politics and sits easily with its agendas.
Further, in a world in which imperialist practices are not condemned, it has become con-
venient for writers to place their narratives in the larger framework of the neo-colonial
project and continue with the classical past which introduces the oriental as uncivilized,
barbaric, inferior, and perpetrator.
The Jewel of Medina (2008) is a collection of several incidents and short stories about
Aisha, the youngest wife in Prophet Muhammad’s harem, her suffering that starts at the
age of six and a range of issues related to the confinement of Muslim women. One of the
194 M. ALTWAIJI AND E. ALWURAAFI
main contentions of the novel is that its events of more than 14 centuries ago represent a
profound challenge to the literary imagination:
Join me in a harsh, exotic world of saffron and sword fights, of desert nomads living in
camel’s-hair tents. . . . We are in seventh-century Hijaz, in Western Saudi Arabia . . .
where Bedouin raiders fight for survival and women have few rights. (Jones 2008, VII)
The Jewel attributes Islamic aggression, backwardness and terrorism to what Jones
describes as a medieval mindset that continues to govern all aspects of the Muslim
life. In an interview with Keskin, Jones says that she wanted to expose the social construc-
tion of the Muslim women to the world through Aisha’s story: “I came across the story of
Aisha for the first time shortly after the World Trade Center attacks in 2001. . . . My goal
was to bring these tales, already familiar to Muslims in the rest of the world, to Western
audiences”(Jones and Keskin 2008). In addition to a fixation on personal insults and cul-
tural squabbles, Jones sees Islamic backwardness and irrationality as being among the
main reasons for Islamist fundamentalist thought and the causes of the main actions
of terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda. In her blog, Jones notes that her narrative work
aims at introducing a scholarly illustration of Islamic history:
I started writing “Jewel”for the pleasure of presenting Aisha to the Western world. . . . I’ve
never been afraid of physical harm because of them. I’ve expected controversy, yes, but never
terrorism. There are no sex scenes in this book. The novel is a work of serious historic fiction
detailing the origins of Islam through the eyes of the Prophet Muhammad’s youngest wife.
(quoted from Bourke 2008)
In The Jewel, Islam is held to be a medieval ideology with a lack of women rights and
intellectual progress on the American model: “Being female meant being helpless. Power-
less. They [women] weren’t supposed to plan, but to let others plan for them. They wer-
en’t supposed to live, only to serve”(Jones 2008, 29). Therefore, Aisha is refashioned into
an American feminist who fights for emancipation of women and challenges the norms
of Islamic culture. She denounces male guardianship, the practice of polygamy and the
Islamic views of women as disempowered with the spirit of a twenty-first-century
feminist:
If they try to lock me away forever, I would escape. . . . I’d be free to live my life the way I
wanted, to run and yell and fight in battles and make my own choices. . . . In the desert, there
were no walls. (Jones 2008, 20)
Chief among the characteristics in The Jewel are the hubristic cast of much of Jones’atti-
tude and the neo-orientalist affinities of many of Aisha’s reactions to the Prophet. It is
with such cultural hubris—its hegemonic nature, its imperialist implications, and its rel-
evance to contemporary Arab-American relationship—that we focus on. To this extent,
Jones is in broad agreement with post-9/11 imperialist tendency that Islam is a religion
that “suspects every woman,”and teaches its followers that “if a woman glances at the
mirror she’s plotting evil”(Jones 2008, 157). What makes Jones imperialist is her descrip-
tion of a seventh-century culture in terms of twenty-first-century human rights dis-
course. Drawing on studies in the field of neo-orientalist theory, we consider how
narratives and political agendas come together to produce cultural machines that serve
to increase the effect of related factors such as religion and history. These cultural
machines largely exhibit what in narratives is known as the property of intellectual entity:
INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT 195
the task whereby imperialism arises out of the interactions between elements which do
not themselves reflect such properties.
The power of Jones’cultural machine lies in the imperial conceit of its polemic, which
not only acknowledges that Lewis’s and Huntington’s so-called “clash of civilizations”is
real, but also proves itself to be a reflexive discourse of imperialism and self-deluded fun-
damentalism. On the one hand, Jones introduces Islam as an institution of extremist
ideologies on which the United States has prosecuted its war. On the other hand,
Jones describes the religious certainty and human rights’fundamentals with which Pro-
phet Mohammed strategized as dubious and inhuman. Aisha, the six-year old fiancée of
the Prophet, shows a deeper understanding of female suffering in Islam and the signifi-
cant implications for constructing female identity in Islam:
I’d known it would happen someday, but not when I was six. Only very few girls were
engaged at birth, as I had been, but they were never confined until they began their monthly
bleeding. To begin purdah at my age was unheard of. (Jones 2008, 20; italics in the original)
More clearly, The Jewel as an imperialist discourse is supported by a hierarchy which
categorizes Muslim women as inferior and therefore, the need for universalizing American
values becomes its impetus to mutate into a feminist force that defines the rights of Muslim
women. The construction of Aisha’s feminist identity is characterized by interactions of an
innate feminist force of liberalism and a religious doctrine that seeks to exploit women:
I slumped onto my bed, feeling as though stones filled my body. Married to Muhammad! It
couldn’t be. He was older than my father . . . why was he allowed to visit me during my pur-
dah, when all other men are forbidden. (Jones 2008, 26)
Religion is, thus, presented as a radical ideology and contrasted with neoliberalism in
order to assert the need for neoliberal feminist values of equality, dignity and freedom
—historically conflated with the Western culture—which are organized against the
authoritarian Islamic values.
Jones argues persuasively that the key to understanding Islamic backwardness and
aggression toward women is not to be found in contemporary exegetical teachings of
Islam, but rather in the formative era of Islamic history; the elitism of masculine voice
in the seventh century: “Even your wives know how to use them for seduction. Covering
one eye is the only true way to avoid scandal”(Jones 2008, 163). It is not merely the case,
for Jones, that religion is understood partly in cultural terms, but, in addition, that cul-
ture is also understood partly in personal terms—that is, personal behaviors, the Pro-
phet’s in this context, take place within an imaginative world maintained by religion:
“This is a solemn occasion, Aisha. The time for children’s games is later.”...Heslippedhiston-
gue inside my mouth. He moved his hands to my waist, and then slowly up my ribcage, toward
my breast. . . . “My Little Red,”he said. “Your body may be ready for me.”(Jones 2008,60)
Several descriptions and episodes in which Aisha and Mohammed’s companions interact
are offensive and their content is soft porn:
Safwan grabbed my breasts and squeezed them hard. He pushed his hand between my legs,
making my blood scream. . . . Of course Safwan would expect to make love with me. . . . “My
f-flower has not been picked,”I said. . . .My marriage has not been consummated. . . . Saf-
wan paced and glowered. “A virgin,”he muttered. “If I take you now, it will unman the Pro-
phet completely.”(Jones 2008, 180)
196 M. ALTWAIJI AND E. ALWURAAFI
In considering Jones’s view of Islamic history and contemporary geopolitics outlined
in the theoretical part, Jones is found to contribute to a short-standing tradition of
imperialist writing about the Middle East: “Novelists are no longer just novelists—they
are also global pundits shaping our opinions on everything from art, life, and politics
to civilization”(Sardar 2006). Another way in which The Jewel relates to our contempor-
ary concerns lies in readers’contention that Islam in post-9/11 narratives is structurally
misrepresented. When Keskin asked Jones if she lost the “thin line between criticism and
insult/racism”while representing Islam and the Muslims, she said that she “wanted to
honor Aisha and the other wives”by “allowing their voices to be heard in a historical tra-
dition that largely focuses on the men”(Jones and Keskin 2008). The Prophet’s religious
perspective and identity are interwoven with the critical marriages to a prepubescent girl
and non-Muslim captive women, reflecting lechery and sensual agendas of a man who is
neither a Prophet nor a humanist: “The Prophet of God must have special powers in the
bedroom”(Jones 2008, 153). When the Prophet decides to marry Raihana, the Jewish
captive whose husband, father, children and brothers are killed in a battle with him,
the Prophet neglects the venture’s liability to create shaky beliefs and to radicalize the
entire institution of Islam:
I will never do that, even to get my sons back. What kind of man is Muhammad? . . . A true
pretender. Claiming to be the Prophet our Jewish Book foretold. Would God anoint an Arab
over one of His chosen people? (Jones 2008, 226)
While Jones seeks to analyze some aspects of women in Islam, the entire narrative reflects
imperial trends focusing on two areas: Islamic backwardness and the tragic situation of
Muslim women. Therefore, The Jewel defines Islam only in relation to aggression, intol-
erance and backwardness, rendering the Muslims barbaric and uncivilized.
From a post-9/11 literary perspective, many American novels that deal with Arab-
American relationship reflect conspicuous attempts to come to terms with the imperial
policy of the United States in the Middle East. Drawing on studies on hegemony and
imperialism as well as on epistemological relativism,
3
Tom Clancy’sThe Teeth of the
Tiger (2003) can be taken as a representative of post-9/11 fictions that dwells on the Mus-
lims’resistance to American imperialism. It tells the story of young Arabs who studied in
the United States and came back home to resist the American imperial project in the
Arab world. Mohammed, the protagonist, devotes much attention to the fight against
the American imperialism because
America threatened everything he held dear. America was an infidel country, patron and
protector of the Jews. America had invaded his own country and stationed troops and weap-
ons there. . . . They [Americans] love the Jews more than their own children. (Clancy 2003,
39)
His commitment to the fight against “Allah’s own enemies”gives a way to a successful
effort that allowed him to confront the US interests and kill its innocent citizens with
aggression, and in a manner that can be seen by his Muslim colleagues as a holy mission:
To them it wasn’t a crime at all . . . it was the illusion that they were doing God’s work. . . .
They all unrolled their prayer rugs and, as one man, said their morning Salat for what they
all expected to be the last time. It took a few minutes and then they all washed, to purify
themselves for the task. (Clancy 2003, 238)
INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT 197
Tom Clancy, best known for military-science narratives, spotlights not only the irra-
tionality of Muslim terrorists but also the efficacy of terrorism, focusing on the role of
religious indoctrination on individuals and groups who kill in God’s name: “Religion
is the centre of their culture. When a guy converts and lives by Islamic rules, it validates
their world”(Clancy 2003, 143). Although The Teeth has been received with contempt by
readers and critics and has been described as a thriller with a “mood of dark moral
ambivalence,”it nonetheless expresses the same ideological arguments on the necessity
of imperialist intervention across the American literary landscape (Jones and Smith
2015, 3). The novel follows the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) secret assassination
campaign against radical Muslims in Europe through an unofficial organization
known as Hendley Associates founded by the former President Jack Ryan: “a secret
organization set up to identify local terrorist threats and deal with them by any means
necessary”(Clancy 2003, 7; italics in the original). However, this organization is intro-
duced to the public as “a trader in stocks, bonds, and international currencies, though,
oddly, it did little in the way of public business”(Clancy 2003, 12). The narrative fore-
grounds the necessity to understand and conceptualize the Islamic concept of paradise
for those who kill in God’s name in order to “meet Allah and enter Paradise at the
time written by God’s Own Hand in God’s Own Book”and “garner the rewards that
would come for fighting in their Holy Cause”(Clancy 2003, 103). The primary message
of the narrative highlights the idea that terrorism is one of the faces of Islam; that the
complexities of monotheist coexistence are, as several transcultural perspectives in
official literature suggest, impossible to be resolved if deploying such anti-religions nar-
rative continues.
Throughout the whole narrative, readers listen only to the American counter-terrorist
voice which provides a strong corresponding point to imperialist narratives that, like The
Jewel of Medina (Jones 2008), The Last Jihad (Rosenberg 2002) and The Scorpion’s Gate
(Clarke 2005), is told from post-9/11 perspective. Clancy’sThe Teeth forces the readers to
assume the position of an observer and a listener, experiencing the American superior
culture and the need to fight Islamic terrorists and, finally, normalizing the domination
on their territories. Focusing on the Islamic terrorism and Muslim terrorists, The Teeth
uses 9/11 as a springboard to justify military attacks on the Muslims and their culture.
For the character of Brian, a marine, an Arab is “an armed enemy, and nothing else.
Not a person, not a human being, not even a thinking brain, just a target holding a
weapon”(Clancy 2003, 8). This is the first in a series of narrative attitudes that give sig-
nificant evidence of the constant effects that loathing and fear derived from 9/11 attacks
provoke in The Teeth:“They kill without warning and attack people unable to defend
themselves. . . . That is why they are called terrorists”(Clancy 2003, 67). It is worth noting
that Clancy’s narrative goes beyond documenting terrorism and its threat, without failing
to document the characteristics of those stages: the identification of terrorism as Islamic
and the compulsory process of confronting Islamic thought. Most notably, The Teeth
emphasizes, as a counter-terrorist and transcultural approach, the importance of suspect-
ing common Arabs like Mustafa who got his education from the United States:
They were such ungrateful bastards, the Americans. Islamic countries sold them oil, and
what did America give in return? Weapons to the Israelis to kill Arabs with damned little
else. Dirty magazines, alcohol, and other corruption to afflict even the Faithful. But which
198 M. ALTWAIJI AND E. ALWURAAFI
was worse, to corrupt, or to be corrupted, to be a victim of unbelievers? Someday all would
be put right, when the Rule of Allah spanned the world. It would come, someday, and he and
his fellow warriors were even now on the leading wave of Allah’s Will. Theirs would be mar-
tyrs’deaths, and that was a proud thing. (Clancy 2003, 193)
What is more, in The Teeth Clancy daringly encourages the American reader to relate
terrorism to a religion that is faulty and different from Christianity: “We’re not after
people who sing too loud in church”(Clancy 2003, 125). The Teeth shows that post-9/
11 novel continues to dwell on religious and cultural differences derived from the 9/11
attacks and their aftermath: “The Afghans were brave enough, but they weren’t mad-
men—or, more precisely, they chose martyrdom only on their own terms . . . they
[Arabs] were barbarians, sure, but even barbarians were supposed to have limits”(18).
Toward the end of the narrative structure, the novel forces the reader—and, in particular,
American readers—to listen to the Muslim voice, allowing the silenced barbaric to tell the
reader about one of the principles he follows:
Muhammad had been the most honorable of men, and had fought a good and honorable
fight against pagan idolaters. . . . Was he, then, an honorable man? A difficult question. . . .
Did Allah desire His Faithful to be prisoners of the seventh century? Certainly not. (341)
The narrative in The Teeth leaves, in this way, the overall message that cultural crises will
continue; that keeping an eye on the Muslims is necessary; and that a hegemonic
approach, which acknowledges differences between modernity and backwardness, super-
iority and inferiority, is crucial to protect the United States from threats coming from the
Middle East.
Richard A. Clarke wrote many novels, the premise of which is the attempts of the
American administration to stop the Arabs’terrorist attacks. However, this is not the
only theme that Clarke tackles in his narrative writing. Other themes include weapons
of mass destruction, American security and intelligence, as well as Islamic fundamental-
ism. Clarke, in his writing, accuses the government’s poor performance in dealing with
Islamic terrorism. He claims that American government had failed to prevent the 2001
terrorist attacks and proved itself incapable of handling the majority of America’s
most crucial security issues. Clarke was a national coordinator for security and coun-
ter-terrorism of the United States. His career in the government began in 1979 when
he joined the State Department during the presidency of Ronald Reagan where he
worked on the Soviet Union. In 1992, he was appointed by President George
H. W. Bush to chair the Counter-Terrorism Security Group. During the presidency of
Bill Clinton, Clarke was further promoted to be the chief counter-terrorism advisor in
the National Security Council. Clarke was, under President George W. Bush, appointed
as the president’s special advisor on cyber security. During his career in the government,
Clarke gained a vast understanding of terrorism and terrorist networks. According to
Wright, Clarke is the “nation’s new terrorism czar. . . . [I]n the web of federal agencies
concerned with terrorism, Clarke was the spider. Everything that touched the web even-
tually came to his attention”(Wright 2006, 205). His involvement in intelligence, terror-
ism, politico-military affairs for three decades not only enables him to assail the inflexible
dogmas of the Arabs and radical Muslims on America, but also helps him accentuate and
deplore the impractical plans of Arab leaders to stop the terroristic violence in their
states. The result is not a scholarly writing that tells a story of terrorists who kill innocent
INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT 199
people, but a narrative work that, to the contrary, adjoins a sociopolitical context to the
radical thought of some Islamic groups in order to produce a space for cultural
judgments.
In Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror (Clarke 2004), Clarke criticizes
the failure of Bush administration to handle the war on terror both before and after 9/11
terrorist attacks. He defiantly introduces the idea of reconstituting an American pro-
cedure for both fighting terror and changing the foreign policy towards Arab states. A
year later, he expanded his ideas into fiction and published The Scorpion’s Gate (Clarke
2005), a novel in which he reproduces themes of terrorism and Bush’s nonfunctional
government. Clarke uses fiction because he believes, as stated on the cover of The Scor-
pion’s Gate, that one “can tell more truth through fiction”(2005). The Scorpion’sspells
out the limitations of Clarke’s nonfiction and expresses the American political agendas
in the Middle East. It is the story of the fall of an Arabian state at the hands of the Isla-
mists who established an Islamic state called the Republic of Islamyah. Although there
are many similarities to what happened before and after 9/11, Clarke declares in the
acknowledgement of the novel that it is fully fictional: “Some may think, as they read
this volume that they see themselves or others portrayed. They do not. This is a work
of fiction, in which all the characters are fictional”(Clarke 2005). Despite Clarke’s state-
ment, themes of unsuccessful intelligence and belligerence administration are inspired by
political tensions and real life occurrences. Nonetheless, by attributing the author’s claim,
Clarke’s authorship is a part and parcel of the American imperial literature that assumes a
superior position in contemporary literature. There is no reason to assume that such a
connection between the themes in The Scorpion’sand the American politics in the
Arab world is devoid of politics.
The Scorpion’sreflects the wide horizons, political interests and imperial agendas of
the United States encapsulated in a form of narrative; a dramatic change in themes
and techniques that tells us two things about the course of neo-orientalism. The first is
the tendency to believe that classical orientalism has been an ideology which belonged
to the past. Classical orientalism is a history which had its own geographic map, themes,
techniques and agendas. This old phenomenon had a counterpart called Occidentalism
which is also out of date. The second trend holds that contemporary American novel is
formed by new patterns of American–Middle Eastern political relationship which are
different from old patterns of West-Islam ideological and religious relationships. The
Islamo-Confucian cooperation in the novel is a reminiscent of the Oriental/Occidental
dichotomy that Clarke maintains in his style: “the missiles they got from China have
nukes on them. He’s gonna get us into a war again out here real soon, and maybe
with China, too”(Clarke 2005, 220). By bringing the Islamo-Confucian cooperation
into the scene once again, Clarke, however, does nothing less than contributing in chan-
ging the course of orientalism by endowing all the possible changes in familiar and unfa-
miliar representations that contribute in imposing a cultural power on the Arab world.
From Gramsci, too, critics acquire an understanding of imperialism as the supremacy
in two ways; “as ‘domination’and as ‘intellectual and moral leadership’” (Gramsci 1971,
193). What Gramsci had in mind and, of course, as he discussed in at least two of his
major works, was the imperial project as a generator of action, sentiment, attitude and
relationships. This insight is a common practice to all imperial projects in the literature
of what Gramsci calls “imperial intellectuals”whose narrative not only plays as the voice
200 M. ALTWAIJI AND E. ALWURAAFI
of the states’“imperialistic and hegemonic expansion”but also as “national and racial
separation between large masses of intellectuals and the dominant class”(Gramsci
1971, 153–154). Post-9/11 American writers saw the essence of neo-orientalism as the
subordination of the cultural institution to the “empire”in an organic relationship,
i.e., the organizing of nationalist writers’“consent.”In a recent study, Tugrul Keskin
uses the term “sociology of orientalism”and refers to the imperial task that literature
has to fulfill after 9/11: “. . . after September 11, Islamic and Middle Eastern studies
have been criticized for inadequately serving US national interests”(Keskin 2018, 13).
According to Keskin, eminent theorists put forward the American interests in literary
work and emphasize its cultural politics: “Bernard Lewis and Martin Kramer suggest
that area or Middle East studies should be restructured based on US national security
interests in the region. This is a neoconservative and Orientalist representation of US
foreign policy within academia”(Keskin 2018, 13). The Scorpion’sis one aspect of
such cultural force and a manifestation of neo-orientalist competence. Within post-9/
11 narratives, imperialistic and hegemonic attitude is understood as an American-centric
instrument of imperial discourse and a convenient approach for understanding Keskin’s
sociology of orientalism.
The watershed reference to American interests is extremely rich in The Scorpion’sin
both legitimizing the imperial project and in delegitimizing the suitability of Arabs’
autonomy. Thus, The Scorpion’sas a record of cultural rapture sustains policies of imper-
ialistic approach toward the Arab world and features assertions of senior American
officials. To quote but a few, Henry Conrad, secretary of defense, states, “The Middle
East is a powder keg, the Chinese are stealing our lunch, and the national security advisor
has to have a hurry-up meeting”(Clarke 2005, 190); Rose Cohen, deputy secretary of
state, “we may have to confront them, block them from getting their troop ships into
the Gulf”(41); Brian Douglas, the American ambassador to Riyadh confirms, “The
Americans won’t abandon this place. . . . The Yanks are like sandwich meat spread
thin onto the Gulfies”(8–9) and Rusty MacIntyre, the senior CIA officer:
You must know that the reason we sent forces to Japan and Germany is that those countries
attacked us. After we defeated them, we gave them money and democracy. We went to Korea
at their request when they were invaded. We also sent American boys to fight and die trying to
help Muslims in Bosnia, in Somalia, in Kuwait. We tried to rebuild Iraq and give it democracy.
We are not the satanic force that you seem to have convinced yourself we are. (205)
Valuable studies on the neo-orientalist implications of post-9/11 novel as an imperia-
listic endeavor can be performed with reference to Foucault’s concept of power-knowl-
edge relationship. The overall effect of this essential relationship and its cultural function
is the national support to the US imperial agenda: “there is no power relation without the
correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presup-
pose and constitute at the same time power relations”(Clarke 2005, 27). Foucault’s asser-
tion suggests that politics and narratives have an equal influence upon one another: “We
should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it
because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge
directly imply one another”(Clarke 2005, 27). All branches of knowledge stick to this
relationship and set certain fundamentals to either describe or distinguish their approach
including politics, economics and narratives as well. Concerns with such a relationship in
INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT 201
neo-orientalist narratives have been introduced and its pillars, the American superiority,
Arab backwardness, Islamic terrorism, are made evident, even if some of them appear
controversial and critical. Quinn summarizes some of the basic principles which are
based on fear of deleterious effects of Islam on Christian beliefs:
. . . religiously, Muhammad was either the Antichrist or a fallen Lucifer-like figure, a cardinal
who failed to be elected pope, so he turned on the church. Personally, he was a flawed
human being, unable or unwilling to contain his sexuality; he was polygamous or a predator,
depending on the account. Politically, he was either a major leader who united the desert
tribes for the first time ever or a 10 greedy despot. (Quinn 2008, 26)
Clarke is undeniably an insider in American agendas in the Arab world. He is at the fore-
front of the American fight on terrorism and radical groups in the region. His thrillers
also briefly deal with the political and ethical questions about the hidden agendas of
the American war on terror. In The Scorpion’s Gate (2005) and Sting of the Drone
(2014; hereafter cited as Sting), for example, he questions the morality and ethics of
drone warfare and the killing of children. In Sting, characters are American politicians,
CIA officers and Arab terrorists who are more or less wealthy Middle Eastern business-
men. The world in Sting is a changing world; terrorists are more powerful than the Amer-
ican counter-terrorism forces and drones. In the fight against terror, the Americans
troops kill children and innocent people without remorse: “I just don’t know what I
am doing here. . . . I am like that freak who shot the kids in Connecticut, a baby killer”
(Clarke 2014, 219). Clarke doubts the utility and effectiveness of the war on terror; ter-
rorists are able to shoot down and hijack American drones and strike back at the US mili-
tary. Clarke considers taking the imperial interests from invisible to visible as a creative
and scholarly approach that takes place beyond the binary opposition of the imperial
approach, where narrative work has genuine message. The clarity of Clarke’s approach
takes into consideration of meanings from different spheres, thereby giving opportunity
for multi-faceted readings of post-9/11 narratives:
. . . we will all face in the years ahead: the oil needs of competing powers, the requirements
for accurate intelligence, the threat of weapons of mass destruction, the challenge of terrorist
groups, the possibility of governments’being dishonest with their people, the responsibility
and loyalty of those in government. (Clarke 2005, vii)
While there exists a wide range of narrative works dealing with post-orientalism or
neo-orientalism, there remain few texts which engage with the complex issues of oil,
instability of Arab countries, and the American imperial interests in the region. The Scor-
pion’sis listed as one. Written as fragments with different settings and narrators, and sus-
tained monologue, this stimulating thriller as a counter-terrorist text provides a fresh
twist on the meaning of neo-orientalism. In his consideration of post-9/11 America,
Clarke wonders whether oil will remain the American energy concern that will lead to
confrontation with regional powers such as Iran:
. . . we can still claim the need to go in to protect the oil from a second-wave Iranian
attack . . . and from the chaos in Islamyah. There is definitely chaos there. They’re changing
leaders by the day. (Clarke 2005, 300)
Therefore, The Scorpion’sis a statement not only against terrorism, radicalism, anti-
Americanism, and so on, but also against American imperial policies that aim at
202 M. ALTWAIJI AND E. ALWURAAFI
controlling sources of world energy in one way or another: “We can’t go into this century
with our energy policy being to fight wars over who gets the remaining oil”(281).
Clarke’s observation also offers important counterpoints to contemporary dominant
scholarship of neo-orientalism that elides the American role in regional violence or, at
least, changes its real position in the list of aggressors. In addition to his reflections on
the way America unleashed wars on terror and the covert agendas behind it, he also
offers a re-reading of the major post-9/11 narratives that are considered to be a techni-
cally adept contribution to neo-orientalism and a potential aid to the American
hegemony.
Rosenberg’s contribution to neo-orientalism removes the confusion about the
relationship between neo-orientalism and imperialism, and between literature and poli-
tics. The Last Jihad (2002) is Rosenberg’sfirst novel and the first of a fictional series called
The Last Jihad Series on Arabs and Arab terrorists. In The Last Jihad, the notion “Allah”
(God) against others is a canonical part to foster interpretations of all aspects of Arabian
life such as beliefs, attitudes, morals, and religiosity. In addition, such an image supports
the belief that a novel is ideal not when narration invokes an emotion but when it shocks
the readers. Joel C. Rosenberg is an American/Israeli communication strategist. In 1988,
he graduated from Syracuse University and started to work for Rush Limbaugh as a
research assistant. Later, Rosenberg worked as a campaign advisor for Steve Forbes
who was a presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000. Rosenberg also opened a political
consultancy business that claims to have worked for Natan Sharansky, former Israeli dep-
uty prime minister, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Last Jihad is set after
Al-Qaeda and the Taliban had been obliterated. No Arabic voice is honored or protected
from criticism in The Last Jihad. American readers do not hesitate to believe its narrative
because they are as committed as the writer in favoring the content to end uncertainties; a
reader is keen to learn about Islamic ideologies which s/he thinks to have been beyond
criticism. The novel is a battle ground against terrorism rather than a literary piece
and this is what makes it provocative of attitudes that are moralistic and informative
rather than aesthetic. More important in the narrative are statistics resulted from this
war that Rosenberg lists in the first chapter:
Forty-three terrorist training camps throughout the Middle East and North Africa had been
destroyed by the US Delta force. . . . Not a single domestic hijacking had occurred in the past
several years—not since a US air marshal put three bullets in the heart of a Sudanese man
who single-handedly tried to take over a US Airways shuttle from Washington Dulles to
New York. And thousands of cell members and associates of various terrorist groups and
factions had been arrested, convicted and imprisoned in the United States, Canada, and
Mexico. . . . America’s economy was stronger than ever. Housing sales were at a record
high. Small businesses were being launched at a healthy clip. Unemployment was dropping
fast. The Dow and NASDAQ were reaching new heights. Homeland security had been
firmly reestablished. (Rosenberg 2002,3)
There is no logic to think that the linkage between text and representations is devoid of
politics. Pointing out the conundrum that determines the writer’s choice of images and
language to describe the Arab world, the leading critics Narayan and Huggins say in
“Whatever Happened to the Idea of Imperialism?”that the US political relationship
with the Arab world is characterized not only by political hegemony, but also by “military
oppression”(Narayan and Huggins 2017, 2388). Their observation offers a crucial key in
INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT 203
the analysis of the dominant narratives of post-orientalism that elides the imperial pos-
ition of the United States in the Middle East. Noam Chomsky’sImperial Ambitions
(2005), which is composed of nine chapters on all aspects of imperialism, is a compre-
hensive project of judging and documenting the US practices and violent involvement
in the Middle East:
It’s undoubtedly central. I don’t think any sane person doubts that. . . . It’s about control of
the oil. If Iraq were somewhere in central Africa, it wouldn’t be chosen as a test case for the
new doctrine of force, though this doesn’t account for the specific timing of the current Iraq
operation, because control over Middle East oil is a constant concern. (Chomsky 2005,5–6)
All the issues related to 9/11 and its consequences have created many complications
and therefore, a re-reading of the literary ideas on the American empire is required.
Reading Rosenberg’sThe Last Jihad in the light of Chomsky’s observations on US imperi-
alism unveils the twin effect of overt American military involvement and the covert cul-
tural assistance to the American administration. The Last Jihad introduces the term
Islamic fundamentalism as a pretext for a prolonged and aggressive war on terror that
defines contemporary Arab-American relationship:
It is said we are part of some “axis of evil”—but the world can plainly see that America and
Israel are evil personified—they are the Sons of Satan—and they must be destroyed. . . .
These cancerous tumors will kill us unless they are removed. They threaten the Arab
world, the world of Islam. But their reign of terror is almost over. Allah, we beseech thee,
please destroy them with your wrath, which is like a sword. Make their blood flow like a
river of justice. (Rosenberg 2002, 300)
Islamic fundamentalism is one of the most ubiquitous topics in post-9/11 narratives.
In The Last Jihad, fundamentalism is not only religion or beliefs; it is also used to refer to
the attitudes of the Arabs towards the United States:
I have no intention but to do whatever pleases Allah and bestows glory onto our Arab
Nation, and we will triumph. . . . Allah is the Greatest. . . . Let the imperialist and Zionist
enemies of our nation be debased. . . . May Allah damn the Jews. (Rosenberg 2002, 178)
In the course of examining extremism in the Arab world, Rosenberg lists many Arab
figures and networks such as Osama bin Laden, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and Hezbollah.
World order is retrieved when these Arab networks have been ripped up and wiped
out by American, Israeli and British forces. Rosenberg makes two points clear in The
Last Jihad. First, Islamic fundamentalism in the Arab world is a political phenomenon,
a politicized movement failed to replace the secularist/dictatorial powers in the Middle
East in order to face the American imperial agendas. Second, the term Islamic terrorism
is a new phenomenon to the author; a fact that provides a theoretically innovative inter-
vention on how readers can approach and interpret twenty-first century imperialism
embedded in narratives. Rosenberg writes in the author’s note in the introduction to
The Last Jihad:
At the time, I had no idea anything unusual was under way. . . . People were reading every-
thing they could get their hands on regarding the threat of radical Islam. . . . The truth is,
America was blindsided on 9/11 by an evil few saw coming. What’s more, those attacks
were just the beginning of a long war against the forces of radical Islam. . . . Few will ever
forget what they were doing on September 11, 2001, when they first heard the news that
204 M. ALTWAIJI AND E. ALWURAAFI
the United States was under attack by radical Islamic jihadists using jet planes on kamikaze
missions. I certainly never will. (Rosenberg 2002,x)
Contemporary American narratives’appropriation of the Arab world has denigrated
several aspects of Islam and Arabic culture and promoted neo-imperialism and neo-lib-
eralism in literary context in order to provide credence to America’s policy in the Middle
East (Jameson 2000, 66). Further, the amplification of themes and images to include the
Prophet of Islam, his wives and his caliphs becomes aggrandized and situates post-9/11
narratives in the larger framework of the neo-imperial agendas of the United States in a
globalized world. Neo-orientalism is therefore an institution neither of modern literary
canon nor of culture, but goes beyond both to encapsulate geo-political conflict upon
which a writer provides a cobbled-together narration on a chimera of perceptible cultural
issues. Explicitly, Chomsky informs the Americans that the government attempts to
dominate the intellectual life through requests for sympathy with the state. A fundamen-
tal assumption, according to him, is often considered unnecessary to formulate because
its truth is taken to be so obvious, which is the guiding principle of Wilsonian idealism:
“We at least the circles who provide the leadership and advise them are good, even noble.
Hence our interventions are necessarily righteous in intent, if occasionally clumsy in
execution”(Chomsky 2003, 24). Although critics struggled to highlight the hazard of
introducing neo-imperial agendas, narrative continued to be an important part of neo-
imperial discourse. Neo-orientalism will continue to grow through the medium of pol-
itical and imperial themes in literature whose literary component becomes less obvious
as many of the subject matters and themes have come to be emanated from contempor-
ary politics.
The inter-state political and economic scramble for wealth of the region highlights the
link between the imperialist expansion and the cultural unity:
The Persian Gulf is a huge source of strategic power and material wealth. And Iraq is absol-
utely central to it. . . . If you control Iraq, you are in a very strong position to determine the
price and production levels. (Chomsky 2005,6)
Rosenberg’s thesis builds upon the official imperialist tradition and the US political ani-
mosity motivated by the economic gains: “We can defang the biggest geopolitical threat
in the Middle East. . . . We can wipe out terrorism and bring peace and prosperity to the
modern Middle East”(Rosenberg 2002, 146). The battle of survival in The Last Jihad
fulfills the economic and neo-imperial aspirations of the United States and strengthens
its hegemonic policy that is already underway: “Saddam could have half the world’s oil
supply under his control by the end of the week”(Rosenberg 2002, 107). As the concepts
of neo-imperialism, capitalism and neo-orientalism have become more relevant to criti-
cal studies on American-Middle Eastern relationship, much of the emerging scholarship
focuses almost exclusively on the phenomenon of terrorism and oil. Such literature has
risen to prominence because they represent a timely and innovative mode of expressing
the interest of the nation and demonstrate solidarity with the state.
Chomsky’s point of view rests upon the assumption that if the American intellectuals
were aware of the state’s agendas in the Middle East, they would have their own auton-
omous approach for representing the issues. In his major works on American-Middle East-
ern relationship such as Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance
(2003), Imperial Ambitions (2005), Intellectuals and the State (1978), and The Fateful
INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT 205
Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians (1983), Chomsky not only addresses
the conflicting relationship between the United States and the Middle East but also registers
his opposition to the US imperialism and highlights the strong influence of the American
imperial agendas on the people: “Washington undertook a massive effort to convince
Americans, alone in the world, that Saddam Hussein was not only a monster but also a
threat to our existence”(Chomsky 2005, 3). Therefore, most of the contemporary fiction
writers remain loyal to the imperial ideal, believing in the historic destiny of narratives
within the umbrella of the Empire. This assumption that American fiction writers support
imperial agendas stands to reason that post-9/11 American novel has become an important
component of the American imperial canon that moves the images of the “other”into the
national level, and breathes a new life into its aesthetic and functional value. The attitude of
this wave of American literature can be described as neo-imperial for its racism and bigotry
are dominant in representing the Arabs; a mode of representation that emanated from clas-
sical orientalism and inflected with neo-liberal methods.
Conclusion
In 1836, Emerson said there is history for everything; there is history for every word and
image: “as we go back in history, language becomes more picturesque”and images and
representations “approach each other in passages of the greatest eloquence and power”
(Emerson 1960, 21). The link between new and old representations of nations often
rests on the supposition that writers are motivated to share the peculiarities of “others”
with the readers with whom they share socio-political affiliations. Similarly, Said’s argu-
ment becomes even more relevant today than it was in the 1970s and 1980s:
I do not recall a period in recent Arab history when there has been so widespread, so sus-
tained, and so anguished an interest in the United States. Beneath all this there is of course
the undisputed fact that America and American interests touch Arab lives with an intrusive
immediacy. (Said 1980,7)
For these reasons, novel continues to be considered a mirror of American culture and
one of the most notable contributors to the corpus of neo-orientalism in which post-
orientalism writers try to adapt to changed geopolitics and assume a transnational and
transcultural perspective on their themes in order to remain at the center.
This study concludes that contemporary American novelists presuppose political
agendas for defending the American interests beyond its borders and attempt to restruc-
ture the cultural relationship between the United States and the Middle East by shifting
the United States’focus on Arab societies. As clear as this conclusion is, the contempor-
ary American novel is based on a premise that ignores important considerations that face
scholars interested in defining the borderline that separates the scholarly institution
called neo-orientalism from neo-imperial discourses, and discourages the production
of independent novel. Therefore, reading contemporary American novels requires devel-
oping the readers’conceptual understanding of the new trends in contemporary Amer-
ican culture independent of preconceived terminology and notions of freedom, equality
and liberalism that have the centrality of the American values as a fact. This is also a step
towards developing a practical basis for engaging in a comprehensive reading of post-9/
11 American novel and its mutations from the vantage point of neo-imperialism.
206 M. ALTWAIJI AND E. ALWURAAFI
Notes
1. Grand strategy, also called high strategy, refers to the purposeful employment of all types of
power available to a achieve security. Nina Silove’s study of grand strategy investigates
whether states respond to threats to achieve security or use forces to attain hegemony. Silove
concludes that the role of grand strategy is to direct all the resources of the state towards the
attainment of the political interests. She also labels three concepts of grand strategy: “grand
plans,”“grand principles,”and “grand behavior”(Silove 2018, 56).
2. Full-spectrum dominance is where a military structure achieves control over all elements of
the battlespace using land, air, maritime, space, and cyber based assets. Full spectrum dom-
inance includes the physical battlespace, i.e., air, surface and sub-surface, as well as the elec-
tromagnetic spectrum and information space. Control implies that freedom of the
opposition force to exploit the battlespace is wholly constrained.
3. Epistemological relativism refers to a construct of knowledge on societies that is governed by
variables such as culture, people, time, place, traditions and practices (Denery 2009, 42).
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the approval and the support of this study by the Deanship of Scientific
Research at Northern Border University, Arar, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, under the grant no.
8157-EAR-2019-1-10-F.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Funding
This work was supported by Northern Border University [Grant No. 8057-EAR-2019-1-10-F].
Notes on Contributors
Mubarak Altwaiji is a Yemeni associate professor of literary theory & criticism and head of the
Department of English Language Skills at Northern Border University, Saudi Arabia. He is the
author of “Neo-Orientalism and the Neo-Imperialism Thesis: Post-9/11 US and Arab World
Relationship.”He is a senior researcher in the field of neo-orientalist studies and post 9/11 Amer-
ican literature.
Ebrahim Alwuraafiis an assistant professor of English literature at the Department of English
Language and Literature, Al Baha University, Saudi Arabia. His main areas of interest are postco-
lonial writing, Arab American writing and Arab writing in translation.
ORCID
Mubarak Altwaiji http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8927-4494
Ebrahim Alwuraafihttp://orcid.org/0000-0002-5537-7548
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