" Ibrahim Abu Lughod is] Palestine's foremost academic and intellectual."--Edward Said

Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798 exposed the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire to a Europe vastly different from the one known to the Arabs of the Middle Ages. At the start of the nineteenth century, Arabs were unprepared for the social, economic, and political progress made in Europe.

By 1870, however, their vague notions had evolved into a fairly sophisticated knowledge of the historic background and contemporary achievements of various European nations. The new reform movements in Egypt and the Fertile Crescent had incorporated into their programs the ideological premises and political institutions of European liberalism.

"The Arab Rediscovery of Europe" is a pioneering work tracing the role of the Arab intelligentsia in increasing Arab awareness of Europe and in shaping an Arab image of the West. First published in 1963, it was hugely influential in instigating a detailed study of Arab views and experiences of Europe during the reign of Egypt's Mohammad Ali in the early to mid-nineteenth century.

Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (1929-2001) was an American Palestinian academic, writer, and editor. He taught at Smith College, Massachusetts; McGill University, Montreal; and then spent thirty-four years at Northwestern University, Illinois, where he founded the Institute of African Studies. He founded the Association of Arab-American University Graduates in 1968 and the journal "Arab Studies Quarterly" in 1978, and held two UNESCO posts. He later became a professor and vice president of Bir Zeit University in the West Bank.

Since the 1948 war which drove them from their heartland, the Palestinian people have consistently been denied the most basic democratic rights. Blaming the Victims shows how the historical fate of the Palestinians has been justified by spurious academic attempts to dismiss their claim to a home within the boundaries of historical Palestine and even to deny their very existence. Beginning with a thorough expose of the fraudulent assertions of Joan Peters concerning the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine prior to 1948, the book then turns to similar instances in Middle East research where the truth about the Palestinians has been systematically suppressed: from the bogus-though still widely believed-explanations of why so many Palestinians fled their homes in 1948, to today's distorted propaganda about PLO terrorism. The volume also includes sharp critiques of the wide consensus in the USA which supports Israel and its territorial ambitions while maintaining total silence about the competing reality of the Palestinians.