American International Journal of Social Science

Orientalism and Orientalists between Extremism and Exaggeration
Dr. Ahmed Gumma Siddiek

Abstract
This article discusses one of the most important issues that formed the cultural, political and social discourse between the West and the East. Orientalism was a hot issue that began some centuries ago and still going on. The Oreintalists were the spearhead in the Western political and cultural invasion in the East. The Muslim World has been a subject to investigations and experiments carried out by the Oreintalists, who were supposed to use survey approaches assumed to be objective and scientific to study the cultural resources of the Islamic Values. These resources were the Quran as the primary authenticated source of Islamic Knowledge and Islamic Teachings. In addition to the Sunna of the Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him) as the second source. But most of the Orientalists’ purposes and objectives were to disgrace these Islamic values by attacking the Quran and raising doubts about the prophet to destroy the Muslim personality. Great efforts were exerted to wash the brain of the Muslim individual, to pave for cultural occupation that would pave the way for military invasion of Muslims home lands, to serve the Western interests. This paper is shedding light on the historical controversial issue of Orientalists role in the Arabic Islamic World from the viewpoints of both the Western and Eastern scholars. The author claims to see a glimpse of hope to establish a new relation between the West and the East, based on the idea of sharing common human interests at one hand, and on the other hand, the West must be reminded of indebtedness to the East as the original source of all values and wisdom on which the Western modern civilization had been built.

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