Journal: Studies in Islam and the Middle East vol. 3, no. 1, (2006) ISSN 1554-0154 Narratives of Colonialism, Race and Ideology in Leon Uris’s the Haj Saddik M. Gohar, United Arab Emirates University Abstract The paper critically examines The Haj as an imperialistic novel incorporating racist and colonialist narratives which aim to defile Arab culture and profane the Islamic religion in order to achieve dubious political purposes. As a novel tracing the development of the Arab-Israeli conflict, argues the paper, The Haj emphasizes the impossibility of reconciliation between the colonized Palestinians and the Zionist colonizers due to racial and cultural differences separating the two sides. Depicting the Palestinians as Arab savages who can not be civilized and viewing the colonizers as carriers of the banners of western civilization and democracy, The Haj deploys narratives of race and ideology replacing the discourse of the real with the discourse of the imaginary in order to make the imaginary desirable and render history consumable. The paper also points out that The Haj aims to justify colonization by depicting the colonial process as a historically inevitable movement of progress toward bringing civilization to the land of the barbarians. In The Wretched of the Earth , Frantz Fanon discusses several means and techniques by which colonial hegemony is fulfilled in the land of colonization. In addition to military domination, Fanon argues that the process of writing history from the viewpoint of the colonizer is a basic aspect of colonialism which has a tremendous impact upon the colonized even after national liberation. The process of history-making which attempts to silence the colonized subaltern is an instrument of colonial hegemony because the