Popular narratives produced from the west, particularly since 9/11, perpetuate negative stereotypes about Middle Eastern Muslim women. Native writers settled in the west also dish out heart-rending tales of women's oppression in fundamentalist Islamic societies, targeting a western audience long fed on tales of Islam's intolerance towards women. These `New Orientalist' narratives, portraying Muslim women as hapless victims of Islamic fundamentalism, only serve to reinforce the stereotypes entrenched in popular western imagination. With Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran as a case in point, this paper seeks to examine how new orientalist narratives misrepresent the position of women in Islamic societies.

Negative stereotypes about Islam, the Middle East and Muslim women have, for long, been perpetuated by the west with a view to legitimizing colonial occupations and imperialist interventions. This negative stereotyping has intensified in the post-9/11 atmosphere of mounting Islamophobia. Fictional works, travel accounts and films proliferate on the `brutal oppression' of women in the Middle Eastern nations of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Jordan and Afghanistan. The oppression of women being characteristic of most patriarchal societies, the vicious politics behind the monolithic depiction of Middle Eastern Muslim women as hapless victims of Islamic fundamentalism, awaiting the mediation of the `enlightened' west for their liberation, has to be exposed and critiqued.

Not only writers from the west, but western-based indigenous writers also deplore the treatment of women in Muslim countries, as if there is a singularity and homogeneity about their position that makes them quite different from their `liberated' sisters in the west. The critical gaze on these women makes them `othered', and fundamentally different, with different problems from those of women in general. The reality is that "although Arab women, like their Western sisters, are victimized by male chauvinism and prejudice, they are by no means as subjugated or oppressed as most Western popular literature would indicate" (Terry, 1985, p. 26). Chandra Talpade Mohanty remarks that colonization implies a political suppression of the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question (2003, p. 49). The stereotypical representations of Middle Eastern women not only erase the social, cultural and political diversity of the region, but also divest the `victimized' women of agency. It is this production of a body of knowledge, privileging the west as the norm or referent, and demonizing the orient as an inferior, infantile `Other', that Edward Said has termed `Orientalist' in his seminal work Orientalism. New Orientalist Narratives

The post-9/11 world has witnessed a massive marketing of stereotyped literary productions in the 19^th century orientalist mode. Fatemeh Keshavarz, an Iranian writer, calls these types of writing `New Orientalist'. She writes

English Studies Journal, Negative stereotypes, a Muslim women, legitimizing colonial occupations, imperialist interventions, Fictional works, travel accounts, films proliferate, Islamic fundamentalism, treatment of women in Muslim countries, cultural and political diversity