Orientalist Representation of Muslims in Torday's Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Abstract

This research makes a cursory exploration through an English novelist Torday’s Salmon Fishing in the Yemen with the spotlight of Orientalism in order to uncover Orientalist representation of the Muslims and Yemenis and also elucidates the reasons and motives behind his orientalization. The preliminary issues in the research query, in specific, are the motives behind showing Sheikh Muhammad’s faith as the cause of the initiation and failure of the salmon fishing project in the Yemen hiding money mindedness of Europeans and the British Blarite government’s political interest on Yemen, and in general, the reasons and motives after depicting Muslims and Yemenis as exotic, impatient, lecherous, debaucherous, malleable, terrorists, and barbarians. The major finding of the research is that Torday writes from positional superiority and strategic location for strategic formation to gain strength and power tied to the powerful and pervading corporate institution of Orientalism. Therefore, intentionally or unintentionally he happens to orientalize the Muslims and Yemenis. And hereafter, the inference this research makes is the reaffirmation of Said’s assumption that the narcissistic Western ideas about the Orient changed in time but not their character.