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Certain departments of orientalism, among others, contributed to the negative inherited views of the West toward the "Orient" and compelled it to adopt hostile and unfair positions vis-à-vis Arabs and Muslims. This attitude, says Hichem Djaït, was characterized by a rigid psychological perception of Islam, self and other that nearly blasts the thought, culture and the very mentality of the different other all together.Ironically, this intellectual and cultural marginalizing of the other, this rigid perception, had elevated the Western-self to an irrational level that contradicts the West's own description of the different other as an "irrational" being.That is: Orientalism had worked hard, indeed, on establishing a cultural and historical world-narrative revolving around the Western-self (a self that is distinguished from the other by superior cultural and ethnic attributes) by negating and minimalizing the other's historical achievements, while claiming to be "rational." Go figure.Hichem Djaït (Hisham Ju‘ayt ; هشام جعيظ) is currently professor emeritus of history at Tunis University. He was a visiting professor at several universities, including Berkeley in 1974, McGill in 1977 and Collège de France in 1988. His books include ازمة الثقافة الاسلامية (Crisis of the Islamic culture), Beirut, Dar al-Tali‘a, 2001; La grande discorde: Religion et politique dans l’Islam des origines (The great discord: religion and politics in Islam), Paris, Gallimard, 1989; Al-Kufa, naissance de la ville islamique (Al-Kufa, birth of the Islamic city), Paris, Maisonneuve et Larose, 1986; Europe and Islam: Cultures and Modernity, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1985; and La personnalité et le devenir arabo-islamique (The Arab-Islamic personality and destiny), Paris, Le Seuil, 1974. Born in 1935 in Tunis, Djaït became agrégé in history in 1962 and received his Ph.D. in history and social sciences in 1981 from the Sorbonne. http://www.ijtihadreason.org/voices/hichem-djait.php
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