Reorientalising Islam: Terrorism and Discourse on Evil

This paper informs us how ‘terrorism’, including ‘islamic radicalism’, has been forcefully employed in post-cold war global politics to inform the forced primacy of secular politics and other liberal  norms. Instead of drawing upon current academic submission to liberal hegemony of knowledge production, the author discloses the contruction of ‘Islamic terrorism’ as illiberal evil of American Empire takes place at both international and global-social domains. As strongly argued, discursive strategy of liberal fundamentalism, affaced through US and western power foreign policy and action, is to recreate and disseminate the perception that it is not terrorism that wears Islamic Cloth but Islam itself uses terrorism as weapon of truth claim for justice. This strategy is what the author calls reorientalization of Islam, reminding us Said’s attacks on the ways colonialism and imperialism have produced ‘the orient’ in favor of the imperialists’ supremacy. This post cold strategic campaign now fails at various fronts of regional politics, particularly in Middle East and Central Asia. But its effects may last longer because it has shaped broader public mind and produced a vast number of Moslem intellectuals and academicians who unconciously promote liberal fundamentalism in powerful language game of ideological warfare like ‘regime change’, ‘multiculturalism’,  ‘international community’, and others of liberal origins as one can easily read in daily newspapers, popular and academic journal and academic curriculum of higher institutions including in Indonesia in the last ten years since 9/11.