Pulp orientalism
Thrillers and their crude caricatures of villainous Arabs, apocalyptic plots and even jihads inspired by Fu Manchu
Robert Irwin
TLS
8/19/11
"Out of the East the cry rose like a curse. In the dark lairs where the Faithful waited, the whisper went round: ‘The Golden Prophet’ has returned to rule the world!’.” So ran the blurb for Sax Rohmer’s The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), a novel in which the Chinese master villain sought to raise the Muslim world in a jihad against the British Empire by excavating the golden mask and sword of El Mokanna, the Veiled Prophet of Khorasan. Fu Manchu’s antagonist, Nayland Smith, has this to say about the credulity of the Muslim masses: “You ought to know as well as I do . . . that superstition is never very far below the surface in even the most cultured Oriental. And these waves of fanaticism are really incalculable. It’s a kind of mass hypnotism, and we know the creative power of thought”.
Modern thrillers set in the Middle East are heirs to medieval Christian treatises on Islam, holy wars and the Apocalypse. Reeva Spector Simon’s Spies and Holy Wars is a sequel to her more wide-ranging The Middle East in Crime Fiction: Mysteries, spy novels, and thrillers from 1916 to the 1980s (1989). Though she does not explore the medieval Christian sources of modern paranoid thrillers, she does devote quite a lot of space in her short survey to the Evangelical Christian thriller. (This, like the Sheikh romance, is a genre of which some TLS readers may have been hitherto unaware.) While some contemporary thriller writers present the Armageddon and the Apocalypse as undesirable events that their dauntless heroes, after many ordeals, will succeed in averting, others piously look forward to the End of All Things with considerable enthusiasm..."more
Modern thrillers set in the Middle East are heirs to medieval Christian treatises on Islam, holy wars and the Apocalypse. Reeva Spector Simon’s Spies and Holy Wars is a sequel to her more wide-ranging The Middle East in Crime Fiction: Mysteries, spy novels, and thrillers from 1916 to the 1980s (1989). Though she does not explore the medieval Christian sources of modern paranoid thrillers, she does devote quite a lot of space in her short survey to the Evangelical Christian thriller. (This, like the Sheikh romance, is a genre of which some TLS readers may have been hitherto unaware.) While some contemporary thriller writers present the Armageddon and the Apocalypse as undesirable events that their dauntless heroes, after many ordeals, will succeed in averting, others piously look forward to the End of All Things with considerable enthusiasm..."more