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De Utopía a la Fobia Imágenes Sesgadas

من الطوبية إلى الفوبيا: نظرة مُحورة

Ahlam Sbaihat, Department of Translation, Faculty of Arts, Al-Isra Private University, Amman, Jordan.

Abstract

 

Middle East, the Holy Land that testified the birth of Jesus, the land of Bedouin known by the manliness, Arab courage and platonic love had been until the eighties of the nineteenth century the utopia, the imaginary world and the virtuous city never written by Plato but by the nineteen-century-orientalists plumes in their travel literature. This idealized world starts to be conversed through the European intervention at the end of the nineteenth century up to the middle of the twentieth century. In this epoch, the religious, political, economical and social atmosphere represented by the ottoman despotism, public disorders and conflicts among the religious schools and their influences on the governmental regime were the cause of the decadence in the Muslim countries and in Middle East. More precisely, this stereotype was created into an occidental tendency to show Islam as an agitated way that leads Middle East to the abyss, so the features more drawn by the orientalists were embodied in the sectarianism, immobilism and despotism. This stereotype must justify the intervention of the reformer powers in the region. Especially when the science mind, human rights and decolonization tend start to rule the life and the mind of the European nations.

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