Your reviewer approached this book with some wariness, having previously been referred to by the author as “an infamous charlatan.” Sure enough, deploying his eccentrically florid version of English, the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University has this to say about me in The End of Two Illusions:
With Bernard Lewis, Orientalism has officially exited the realm of colonial reason and entered the twilight zone of its unreality—it is now positively delusional, just like “the West” it defends and its habitual hobby horse of “civilization,” which it takes out of the closet for yet another fantasy ride. In this hallucinatory project, Bernard Lewis is aided by an even sorrier gang of minions like Daniel Pipes on one side and self-loathing native informants like Fouad Ajami on the other.
But, getting serious, Dabashi devotes his volume to answering a question:
Whence this hatred, wherefore this bizarre fixation with making Muslims, just for the accident of being Muslims, the enemy of reason, sanity, and civilization?
Underlying all such antipathy is the unexamined presumption of an innate hostility between “Islam” and “the West"—two vast abstractions with frightening powers of persuasion. ... This presumed opposition between “Islam” and “the West” corresponds to a particular period of globalized capital when its innate and debilitating contradictions are in need of a fictive center and a global periphery cast as culturally inferior to “the West"—ready for abuse, plunder, and domination.
The works of Huntington, together with those of Francis Fukuyama, Bernard Lewis, and Alan Bloom, demonstrate a collective fear of losing the stronghold of white Christian supremacy.
