“On the Coattails” of Supremacy: Neo-Orientalism in Fouad Ajami’s The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey

Abstract

This paper focuses on Fouad Ajami’s The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey and touches on his The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice since 1967. In both books, one can find many examples of Orientalist thinking, but in a new form. Using Ali Behdad and Juliet A. Williams’s discussion of neo-Orientalism and Hamid Dabashi’s post-Orientalism, we argue that the former book is a neo-Orientalist literary history that not only exemplifies neo-Orientalism but also anticipates its proliferation in the aftermath of 9/11. We further claim that it builds on the legacy of colonialism in our neoliberalized world. In it, Ajami divides the writers and the writings that he mentions into two parties: the protagonists—those who embody Western thinking—and the foils or villains—the ones who reject such thinking. We see this paper as a small gesture towards exposing Orientalist thinking in its new form and resisting it and its colonial manifestations. Keywords: Fouad Ajami, Neo-Orientalism, Literary History, Post-Orientalism, Neoliberalism.