/u/Zooasaurus and I talk about two different eras--19th century and Middle Ages--in this earlier thread. I'll c-p mine here, but you really should check out theirs as well!

Oh, and I don't know if this interests you, but I also have an earlier answer on medieval Arab Orientalism re: Persia and especially China, although it's almost entirely about Arab writers' reported experiences in real-China. The underlying situation is basically this: our modern idea of "Orientalism" is heavily shaped by the Arabian Nights. Well, in the various original (or at least original Arabic) 1001 Nights, many of those stories aren't set in "Arabia"--they're set in China.

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The existence of "Occidentalism," or, as he prefers, "Ifranjism" in medieval Arabic/Islamic literature is precisely the argument of Nizar Hermes in The [European] Other in Medieval Arabic Literature and Culture.

Hermes takes his term from what Muslims in the Near East called the crusaders (Ifranj => Franks). It is more fitting because, after all, Iberia is as occident as continental Europe gets and parts of it were under Islamic rule for basically the whole Middle Ages. It's still a little wonky because he includes Byzantium with Latin Europe at a few points. However, as he and Nadia El-Cheikh have shown, the medieval Arabic literary relationship with Byzantium is complex and fickle, and Muslim authors often use Byzantium as a foil for the Ifranj.

Hermes makes the following points that align Ifranjism with the general understanding of Orientalism:

1. Medieval Arab Muslim writers were fascinated by Europe (beyond the religious polemic sense). The rest of the book bears this out and it seems obvious, but Hermes points out that--shades of Orientalism!--scholars had long just assumed Muslims only cared about Europe for religious polemic/conversion reasons.

2. Religion was the primary framework through which they defined Us and Them. When Ibn Fadlan visited "Viking" groups along the Volga, he took a purely practical attitude towards the Jurjanis--explaining how they dealt with the cold weather, not using "cold climate" as an explanation of their supposed barbarism...because the Jurjanis were Muslim. Once he realized the Oghuz weren't going to convert, Ibn Fadlan pulled out all the stops to paint them as barbaric. The use of anthropological and climatological factors to define that Other that had already been defined along religious lines was not uncommon. Al-Masudi argued for a version of the ancient Greek climate zones--the farther north you went, the stupider and angrier the people got. He was differentiating, essentially, between Franks and Slavs (as well as between Christians and Muslims).

3. Writers treated Islamic culture as the subject and Christian culture as the object. They saw what they wanted/needed in their object of study--a combination of similarities and differences that highlighted both the superiority of Islamic culture and the validity of the comparison.

4. They emphasize the barbarity and sexuality of the Franks, including by unflattering comparison to the Greeks. (Who, El Cheikh showed, also come in for accusations of being oversexed in other literature). Pagans receive harsher treatment than Christians on these grounds; there is almost more of an air of a dance: al-Ghazal's famous (probably fictional) account of his embassy to (maybe) Ireland or Iceland and the seduction attempt by the Christian queen; Yahya's commentary on the women of Rome as especially beautiful paired with the idea of Romans' sexual prowess.

5. They craft an air of mystery, mythology, and exoticism around Europe and Europeans, especially the city of Rome. Islamic apocalyptic held that Muslims' conquest of Rome was one of the signs of the end of the world, so writers like Harun ibn Yahya emphasized the good points of the city as marvels.

6. The ultimate purpose is to define their own culture by turning the other into what they want to stand against. 10th century polemic stresses the impurity of Christians; a poem from a 9th century prisoner of war in Byzantium depicts Christendom as a place of alienation and separation--that is, utter foreignness.

7. As with Orientalism, the above points paint far too blunt a picture. Of course day-to-day interactions between Muslims and Christians broke the "rules" all the time. But even Arabic literature admits moments of complexity and nuance.

Reading the book, I sort of had the impression that Hermes strove for "Ifranjism" because he had to tack on A Thesis to a really fascinating exploration of medieval Arab Muslims' writing on Christian Europeans. It's definitely a political stance, too--an assertion of the power of a culture that was/is Orientalized, and a demonstration of the ubiquity and timeless of the need to exoticize the Other.

I'm rarely convinced by the "everything we write is defining ourselves" argument. Nevertheless, I think ultimately Hermes presents enough evidence for a mix of description, mythologization, comparison, and fascination with Christian Europeans to justify the term "Ifranjism."