Islam, 'Soft' Orientalism and Hegemony: A Gramscian Rereading

The neo-Gramscian framework offers one of the more innovative contributions to a discipline long embedded in the self-same verities of behaviouralism, positivism and neo-Realism. As with conventional wisdom, however, neo-Gramscians reproduce either assumptions of liberal neutrality or cultural thickness in relation to the 'peripheral zones' of the global political economy. These tendencies produce a variant that can be likened to 'soft Orientalism'. In the first instance, cultural difference is not much of an impediment to the establishment of (West-centred) global hegemony. In the second instance, otherness becomes the principal source of counter-hegemonic movements or resistance. This article provides a Gramscian rereading of these antinomies in relation to the apparent consolidation of a natural attitude towards Islam in the wake of recent dramatic events.