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Occidentalism

Audiobook
Nonfiction: History
Unabridged   4 hour(s)
Publication date: 04/24/2018

Occidentalism

The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies

Available from major retailers or BUY FROM AMAZON
Audio CD ISBN:9781684413409
Digital Download ISBN:9781684413416

Summary

Occidentalism is a groundbreaking investigation of the demonizing fantasies and stereotypes about the Western world that fuel such hatred in the hearts of others. A work of extraordinary range and erudition, Occidentalism will permanently enlarge our collective frame of vision.

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Product Description

We generally understand "radical Islam" as a purely Islamic phenomenon, but Buruma and Margalit show that while the Islamic part of radical Islam certainly is, the radical part owes a primary debt of inheritance to the West. Whatever else they are, al Qaeda and its ilk are revolutionary anti-Western political movements, and Buruma and Margalit show us that the bogeyman of the West who stalks their thinking is the same one who has haunted the thoughts of many other revolutionary groups, going back to the early nineteenth century. In this genealogy of the components of the anti-Western worldview, the same oppositions appear again and again: the heroic revolutionary versus the timid, soft bourgeois; the rootless, deracinated cosmopolitan living in the Western city, cut off from the roots of a spiritually healthy society; the sterile Western mind, all reason and no soul; the machine society, controlled from the center by a cabal of insiders—often Jews—pulling the hidden levers of power versus an organically knit-together one, a society of "blood and soil." The anti-Western virus has found a ready host in the Islamic world for a number of legitimate reasons, they argue, but in no way does that make it an exclusively Islamic matter.

Reviews/Praise

"Succinct, elegant, and challenging..." —The Economist

"A useful primer on the habits of mind that drive our most implacable foes.... Accurate and fair-minded." —The New York Times

Author Bio

Ian Buruma was educated in Holland and Japan. He has spent many years in Asia, which he has written about in God's Dust, A Japanese Mirror, and Behind the Mask. He has also written Playing the Game, The Wages of Guilt, and Anglomania.
Avishai Margalit is an Israeli Professor Emeritus in philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 2006 to 2011, he served as the George F. Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.