Self-exoticizing natives serve empire by flaunting their own degraded faith
Evidence
Mixed with this vulgar audacity is a brazen exhibitionism, an obvious pleasure in flaunting his outrages. It is as though he had conducted a study of the most obnoxious things European and American Orientalists have said about Islam, then looked into the most racist recent Islamophobic utterances, and then either quoted them or reprocessed them in his own prose. “I am not a scholar or a specialist,” he explains, before going on to declare Bernard Lewis “one of the great prose writers of English of the last fifty years—elegant, urbane, and subtle” and to thank Daniel Pipes for his scholarship; and then to resurrect the decayed corpses of the most outlandish Orientalists of the past two hundred years for a danse macabre. Ibn Warraq resuscitates the darkest moments of Orientalist racism, taking particular pleasure in denying his own ancestral faith and culture, his people and parentage—in other words, himself. We are in the presence of a Muslim masochist. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 468
Categorization
- XREF: Pattern of the native informer connects to the reader’s knowledge of self-loathing colonial subjects in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and H.M. Naqvi’s Home Boy.