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Abstract

This article examines how Lord Jim constructs and reconfigures Muslim identities within the discourse of British imperialism. While previous scholarship has explored the novel’s colonial politics, less attention has been paid to how its representations of Malay Muslims reveal the instability of Orientalist categories. Using Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism and Homi Bhabha’s theory of colonial ambivalence, the study applies close textual analysis of two key narrative moments: the omniscient narrator’s description of the Muslim pilgrims aboard the Patna and the depiction of Malay Muslims in Patusan. The analysis demonstrates that the Patna pilgrims are initially represented through familiar Orientalist stereotypes but simultaneously emerge as unsettling doubles of Jim, disrupting the binary opposition between European self and Muslim Other. This instability is subsequently managed in Patusan, where Jim restores colonial hierarchy by supporting Doramin’s Bugis faction against Sherif Ali, reproducing a Eurocentric vision of political order through regime change. The novel shifts from an unstable representation of Muslim alterity to one that reasserts imperial authority by constructing new forms of difference. Lord Jim thus exposes the fragility of Orientalist discourse and its continual need to reinvent the Muslim “Other” in order to sustain imperial legitimacy.

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