Reserach proposal Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Reserach proposal - Essay Example The postmodern media revolution could only aggravate the situation further with, especially since 9/11 disaster, misrepresentations and distorted images of Islam and Muslims gaining unprecedented and higher visibilities in the Western public spheres. However, despite the seeming ruptures this process of representation and misrepresentation has a definite historical and political backdrop embedded within huge cultural politics spanned across the centuries, ever since negotiations of different sorts had commenced between the Christian and Muslim cultures. This project attempts to study about western perceptions of Islam especially since the middle ages to the contemporary times and the surrounding cultural politics, both international and domestic. The specific objectives of the study are: 1. To deconstruct the meaning and understanding of Islam and Muslim culture at large as they are predominantly represented within the western culture – since the medieval to modern times. 2. T o throw light upon the historical and political backdrop and the cultural elements invariably involved in the production of knowledge about Islam and its culture in the west. 3. ... The attempt is precisely oriented towards exposing the hidden cultural politics behind stereotyping a whole culture and on what basis such stereotypes get reception and get reproduced over different periods of time. Contextualising the project and review of literature As I mentioned earlier the proposed project shall focus on the image of Islam in the West from the medieval ages to the present. The study is immensely significant since the â€Å"West must deal with Islam as a growing social, political and religious reality† (Quinn, 2008: 17). A significant development in the recent global politics, especially in the aftermath of the 9/11 incidents and the recent war on Iraq and the related events, is the emergence of a fungible notion of Islam and terrorism. Issues pertaining to Islam are already finding their place in the cutting edge of political, military and economic interests of the West. The terrain is much complicated, and still adds onto it, with the fact that a great d eal of ignorance about Islam and its culture in general is further manipulated by those in the political forefronts in the West to build upon a historically and culturally constructed notion of hostility and incongruity between Islam and Christian cultures. The images, representations, and perceptions of Islam are â€Å"abound in the academic and popular press† throughout the twentieth-century world (Mirza, 2007: 2). Perhaps with the intellectual and technological changes, together with the recent historical events in the contemporary Muslim world, greater attention to certain institution or faith such as Islam has become widely possible (Esposito, 1999: ix). Bassiri (2010) has traced this synonymous usage between Islam and terrorism back to the age of Reagan