On 24th of September of the world's most influential and eloquent Palestinian Arab writer, Edward Said, died of Leukemia.
Said’s death should give us pause to think upon new manifestations of the phenomenon he so often discussed: 'mystifications' that are inserted into our cultural imagination.
The most recent example of mystification is the concept of 'Islamic terrorism' and its associated terms ('Muslim terrorists', 'militant Islam', and so on). I claim this is a 'mystification' in two senses. First, it either intentionally or unintentionally confuses analytically unrelated ideas - Islam and terrorism - enabling their conflation, and