This book represents a balanced critical attempt to understand the phenomena of Arab Occidentalism – primarily using the case of Egypt – that engages with the complexities of the Arab world's conception and image of the Western other. In this respect the book agrees with the perspective of the late Hasan Hanafi in his book "An Introduction to Occidentalism" concerning the significance of the endeavor of Arab researchers to present objective knowledge about the East in contrast with the subjective knowledge consolidated by the orientalist perspective, of which the great intellectual Edward Said was the foremost critic and antithesis. Hence, the occidentalist trend represents an intellectual approach that aims to overcome the Arabs' sense of shortcoming or inferiority before the West (as indicated by Hasan Hanafi in this book, and which he sees as an historical complex between self and other) and to confront the dominant centrality of the West in knowledge terms, even with respect to Arab knowledge spaces. In this context, the current book marks a shift in perspective from the West/America, not as studying subject but as object of study. This implies the restoration of the Arab voice to express Arab self-identity and its vision of the Western other, as part of a process of balanced multi-cultural negotiation that includes conscious, objective criticism of both self and other alike, and goes beyond the stereotypes based upon one-sided views steeped in rejection/exclusion or appropriation/attraction.