A “New Middle East” Following 9/11 and the “Arab Spring” of 2011?—(Neo)-Orientalist Imaginaries Rejuvenate the (Temporal) Inclusive Exclusion Character of Jus Gentium

Abstract

The resurgence of a deterministic mode of representation mythologizing Arabs as figuring (threatening) Saracen by judging their epistemological commitments as hostile to Enlightened reason-based ideals is demonstratively identifiable after 9/11, and more so following the Arab uprisings in 2011, when we notice that the Arab in general, and Muslim in particular, was historicized as the “new barbarian” from which (liberal-secular) Westphalian society must be defended. Such neo-Orientalist representations disseminate powerful discursive (symbolic) articulations (i.e., culture talk) —in tandem with the (re)formulation of legal concepts and doctrines situated in jus gentium (i.e., sovereignty, immanence, and pre-emptive defense strategy)—legally adjudicating a redemptive war ostensibly to “moralize” a profane Arabia. Proponents of neo-Orientalism define their philosophical theology as not simply incompatible with Arab epistemology (Ar. نظريةالمعرفةالعربية), but that Arab-Muslims are an irreconcilable threat to Latin-European philosophical theology, thus, accentuating that neo-Orientalism is constituted by an ontological insecurity constituting Arab-Islamic philosophical theology as placing secular modern logic under “siege” and threatening “civil society”. This legal-historical research, therefore, argues that neo-Orientalism not only necessitates figuring the Arab as Islamist for the ontological security of a “modern” liberal-secular mode of Being, but that such essentialist imaginary is a culturalist myth that is transformed into a legal difference which proceeds to argue the necessity of sanctioning a violent episode transforming a supposed lawless “Middle East” receptive to terror, into a lawful “New Middle East” receptive to reason. This sacrilegos process reveals the “inclusive exclusion” temporal ethos of (a positivist) jus gentium which entails maintaining a supposed unbridgeable cultural gap between a (universalized) sovereign Latin-European subject, and a (particularized) Arab object denied sovereignty for the coherence of Latin-European epistemology.

The post‐9/11 novel revisited: Reading three perspectives in contemporary American fiction

“…Post‐9/11 racialization has deprived American Muslims of several social, economic, and cultural rights and presented their identity as incompatible with modernity and Americanness (Al‐Kassimi, 2019, 2021; Altwaiji, 2021; Itaoui, 2020; Robertson, 2014; Waikar, 2018). Waldman asserts in an interview with Jeffrey Brown that the Muslims are degraded and homogenized in political and media discourses across the country, which result in a wide range of Islamophobic practices, violation of human rights, and exclusion from economic, social, and political spaces:

How do we decide who to trust?

…”

“…Many scholars tend to see American literature as a mouthpiece for US ideology and focus on the way novels seem to justify imperialism, neoliberalism, counter‐terrorism, and neo‐orientalism (Al‐Kassimi, 2021; Holland & Jarvis, 2014; Jones & Smith, 2010; Keskin, 2011). Their arguments build on political chronologies across two decades and their geopolitical implications, mainly focusing on how political chronologies have reflected an increasing hegemonic attitude—that is, either by using military intervention to change regimes, having sovereignty over lands, supporting puppet dictatorships, or imposing sanctions on some Arab countries.…”