The western image of Arabs in Ahdaf Soueif’s the map of love and Fadia Faqir’s My Name is Salma

Abstract

The current study deciphers how Ahdaf Soueif and Fadia Faqir, who are known as diasporic Arab writers, adopt the western stereotypical perspectives towards the Arabs. Instead of advocating Arabs and demystifying their identity against the western stereotypical misconceptions, Soueif (2000) and Faqir (2007) represent Arabs as backward, passive, and violent terrorists, as evident in their novels. Thus, the study explains how those Arab diasporic writers adopt the western stance against Arabs by enhancing and highlighting the image of Arabs as different from the rest of the globe at the cost of Arabs and in favor of the West. The study deploys Said's Orientalism to read the narratives under discussion, highlighting that such narratives misrepresent how Arabs think, behave, and feel to gain some plausibility and popularity in the West (Occident). Soueif and Faqir, we argue, sacrifice the ethics of loyalty and belonging to Arabs in favor of assimilating with the West and gaining its admiration, which resulted in creating a very inaccurate portrait of Arabs. The study reveals the potential reasons of such unethical behaviors, emphasizing that falsifying the reality of the Arab World by some Arab diasporic writers should never be the optimal way to assimilate with the West or cope with its expectations.