A Collège de France - CNED coproduction
Abstract
More than a quarter of a century ago, as a young researcher beginning my work on contemporary Arab societies, the controversy raged, revived by Edward Said, over the way in which the West had created the notion of the Orient for imperialist purposes. The domination imposed from outside would be relayed by a discourse that made Arab and Muslim societies into entities frozen in their essence, whose only positive future required a benevolent external intervention charged with putting them back in line with a historical evolution defined by others. This was as true of scientific disciplines as it was of all literary and artistic representations of the Orient.
