The End of Two Illusions

Islam after the West

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Pub Date Apr 19 2022 | Archive Date Nov 01 2022

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Description

Dismantling the myths that divide Islam and the West, this cutting-edge work of critical thinking proposes new ways to reread Islamic and world histories.

Extending from the front-page news coverage of our daily lives back into the deepest and most revelatory histories of the last two hundred years and earlier, Hamid Dabashi's The End of Two Illusions is a daring, provocative, and groundbreaking work that dismantles the most dangerous delusions manufactured between two vastly fetishized abstractions: "Islam" and "the West." With this book, Dabashi shows how the civilizational divides imagined between these two cosmic binaries have defined their entanglement—in ways that have nothing to do with the lived experiences of either Muslims or the diverse and changing communities scarcely held together by the myth of "the West."

Through detailed historical and contemporary analysis, The End of Two Illusions untangles the motivations that produced this global fiction. Dabashi demonstrates how "the West" was an ideological commodity and civilizational mantra invented during the European Enlightenment, serving as an epicenter for the rise of globalized capitalist modernity. In turn, Orientalist ideologues went around the world manufacturing equally illusory abstractions in the form of inferior civilizations in India, China, Africa, Latin America, and the Islamic world. The result was the projection of "Islam and the West" as the prototype of a civilizational hostility that has given false explanations and flawed prognoses of our contemporary history, with weaponized Islamophobia on one side and militant Islamism on the other as its most palpable manifestations. Dabashi argues it is long past time to dismantle this dangerous liaison, expose and overcome its perilous delusions, and reimagine the world beyond its shimmering mirage. The End of Two Illusions is the most iconoclastic work of critical thought and scholarship to emerge in recent memory, clearing the way toward a far more liberating imaginative geography of the world we share.
Dismantling the myths that divide Islam and the West, this cutting-edge work of critical thinking proposes new ways to reread Islamic and world histories.

Extending from the front-page news coverage...

Advance Praise

"This book should have been written a long time ago. It is the first bold and incisive deconstruction of the greatest fabricated binary of this century: 'Islam and the West.' This old Orientalist and destructive juxtaposition has survived until today and provided the moral justification for the brutal American assaults on Afghanistan and Iraq. This book offers a different genealogy for the emergence of this constructed binary, positioned one against the other in a poisonous, and artificial, relationship. Hamid Dabashi forcefully challenges this dangerous concept of 'Islam and the West,' offering an alternative de-racialized and humane perspective—visions of the past and future that will be essential for all who are embroiled and affected by this insidious and violent construct. Scholars and the wider audience will find in this book an accessible, honest, and very readable critique of a notion that impacts the lives of so many of us in this century."—Ilan Pappé, Professor of History and Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies, University of Exeter

"This book should have been written a long time ago. It is the first bold and incisive deconstruction of the greatest fabricated binary of this century: 'Islam and the West.' This old Orientalist and...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9780520376922
PRICE $29.95 (USD)
PAGES 364