The image of Arab/Muslim in the Western collective imagination

Realities or stereotypes?

Abstract

The conceptualization of a distorted image around the Arab/Muslim is the result of a tangled process where the relationship between the Western Us and the Eastern Other has a hostile and devastating character. The domination of
the Different Other is the complicated accumulation of historical processes where philosophical and scientific theories intertwine with the religious recommendations of missionaries at the service of the colonial era. The historical
background based on the colonizations has cemented solid platforms to fix in the Western collective memory a constant difference between the superior Westerner versus the other inferior. These bases are fed, today, in
new ways to continue marking gaps between both parties, and fossilize, with great fluidity, in the idiosyncrasy of the Westerner the image of the barbaric and impotent Other.

In this essay we present a brief diachronic journey about the relationship between the West and the East to expose some facts belonging to different fields, and that have been used to justify the colonial process. Likewise, we tried to delimit the new aspects that fuel the stereotype inherent to the Arab/Muslim and that concretize the inferiority of the other Oriental, namely: the media, the film industry, novels and translations.