Faculty & Fellows Colloquium

Anglo-American Myths of the Islamic East

In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said asserted that even the most scholarly works on the Islamic East were skewed by intended or unintended prejudices against Islam, by a colonialist sense of superiority of the “enlightened” West over the “mysterious” East, and that since medieval times there has been “traffic” between what scholars and specialists write about the East “and what poets, novelists, politicians, and journalists” have written. All of these have propagated the stereotypes of Arabic, Islamic, and Central Asian “sensuality, sloth, fatalism, cruelty, degradation and splendor,” starting with John Buchan and extending to the present day. This paper is not about "the East" as it is, nor even about how it might be intelligently understood, but instead about how it has been broadly perceived in the popular consciousness of the Anglo-American West, and how these perceptions have been and continue to be reflected, created, and conditioned by popular culture. We will reach back to the Alexander myth of Greek and Roman times, continue through the images of the East in works by Marlowe and Coleridge, and conclude with American movies of the recent past, including "300" and "Prince of Persia."

Jeffrey Garrett is associate University librarian for special libraries at Northwestern and the library's subject specialist for linguistics. His research interests include knowledge organization and cognition, 18th and early 19th century German library history, and international children’s literature. Among his more recent publications are “Screams and Smiles: On Some Possible Human Universals in Children's Book Illustration;” “KWIC and Dirty? Human Cognition and the Claims of Full-Text Searching;” “The Legacy of the Baroque in Virtual Representations of Library Space;” and “Memory Loss in Iraq.” Garrett was chair of the AAU-ARL German–North American Resources Partnership from 2003 to 2006, and served twice as president of the Hans Christian Andersen awards jury of the International Board on Books for Young People. Among his academic honors are a Regents Fellowship from the University of California, a Bavarian State Scholarship from the University of Munich, and a Martinus Nijhoff International Study Grant from the Association of College and Research Libraries.