Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Islamophobia & Europhobia: Subaltern Discourse & Its Limits, Peter O'Brien

Political Science Faculty Research

This essay examines resistance to Islamophobia in the form of Europhobia produced by Islamists in Europe. By "Europhobia" I mean essentializing and distorting depictions of Europe (and the West) as thoroughly decadent, corrupt, and sadistic. In a process that I dub "inverted othering" Islamists emulate the discursive strategies of Islamophobes but invert their negative stereotypes of Muslims to portray (non-Muslim) Europeans as a menacing threat to the umma, or Arabic community. I spotlight three forms of "inverted othering" through systematic comparison of both Islamophobic and Europhobic discourse in Europe (including in cyberspace): Islamists invert the claim that Islam is …

Islamic Civilization And (Western) Modernity, Peter O'Brien

Political Science Faculty Research

Much historiography of the last three decades has undermined the sway of Eurocentrism. Though unabashedly Eurocentric histories still become bestsellers,¹ revisionists have shown that the ideas and developments that spawned modernity hardly sprang sui generis from European soil. In their historic re-awakening starting at the end of the Middle Ages that ushered in the Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, Europeans borrowed and augmented a vast array of ideas, institutions, and practices particularly from Islamic, but also Indian and Chinese, civilization.²

This article contends that such revisionism, itself now putative, does not probe searchingly enough the inter-civilizational encounter …

Europe: A Civilization On The Edge, Peter O'Brien

Political Science Faculty Research

Our European culture is one that has staked its all on the universal and the danger menacing it is that of perishing by the universal.

Jean Baudrillard¹

Rémi Brague rejects common charges of Eurocentrisim leveled against Western civilization. He prefers to characterize the West as "eccentric," meaning off center. He equates Western civilization with Europe and understands it as that civilization which grew out of the western half of the Roman Empire and with time differentiated itself from Byzantine and Islamic civilizations (themselves successors to the Roman heritage). He labels Europe eccentric because it stands (physically and figuratively) on …

Islam Vs. Liberalism In Europe, Peter O'Brien

Political Science Faculty Research

In the West, Muslims are regarded with anxiety, mistrust, and fear. Many of us choose not to travel to Muslim countries for fear of becoming victims of terrorism. Most westerners worry about the Muslims' firm grip on the spigot of the world's oil reserves. And in 1991 we convinced ourselves that Saddam Hussein represented a threat on par with Hitler.¹

But Muslims cannot really scare us. After all, it took but a few weeks to vanquish fully the "Butcher of Baghdad," who had up until that time the world's fourth largest army. We united in a stalwart international coalition …