“Splitting” renders the Rest the West’s mirror-image Other

Evidence

The fundamental baseline of Orientalism was casting the Muslim world as the mirror opposite of the West. Said opens Orientalism with this: “The Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.” The process of characterizing and vilifying the Muslim world, which Orientalists dub the Orient, became the very way in which the West, as well as its principal thinkers, statesmen, and tastemakers, came to define itself. This mirrored identity was very much a fluid dialectic, whereby the shifting characterizations of the Muslim world—informed by political engagements with Muslim-majority nations, colonial interventions and projects, and most intensely, clashes—would also inform how the West saw itself. — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 159 (#epitomizes, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The West defined itself as the mirror opposite of the Muslim world. — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 159; The Rest was constitutive of the West’s identity and knowledge — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity…, 686; The West’s self-conception formed only in relation to the Rest (+9 more)

Related

• The West defined itself as the mirror opposite of the Muslim world. (similarity 0.91)
• The West required the Rest as a conceptual opposite to define itself. (similarity 0.91)
• The West defined itself as the mirror image of the Muslim Orient (similarity 0.86)
• The Occident defines itself as the mirror image of the Orient (similarity 0.85)
• Orientalist discourse frames Westerners and Orientals as absolute binary opposites. (similarity 0.84)
• Islamic challenge forged the collective identity of ‘the West’ (similarity 0.83)
• The West-Orient binary found its first legitimised modern manifestation in Orientalism (similarity 0.83)
• Orientalism imagined Muslims as a monolithic Arab or Middle Eastern racial bloc. (similarity 0.82)
• A shared East-West binary grounds vast and diverse bodies of thought (similarity 0.82)
• The West and the Rest is a constructed, contingent discourse (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism fixes the Orient as passive reactor to the West’s self-assigned agency (similarity 0.82)
• Orientalism reflects the producing culture rather than its putative object (similarity 0.82)
• The Westerner’s intimate estrangement from the Orient reinforces the Orientalist discourse built on it. (similarity 0.82)
• Western images of Muslims and Jews formed in inextricable conjunction (similarity 0.81)
• The West and the Rest is constituted as a discourse, not a geography (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• The West defined itself as the mirror opposite of the Muslim world. #epitomizes (0.95) — Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Understanding…, 159
• The West’s self-conception formed only in relation to the Rest #corroborates (0.95)
• The West required the Rest as a conceptual opposite to define itself. #epitomizes (0.95)
• The Rest was constitutive of the West’s identity and knowledge #expands (0.90) — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 686
• The West and the Rest is a constructed, contingent discourse #corroborates (0.85)
• Europeans project their repressed evil onto the racialized Other #expands (0.85)
• Ideology defines the self by stigmatising the Other #corroborates (0.85) — Chris Allen, Islamophobia, 833
• Global events normalized Islamophobic discourse and made Muslims the ultimate Other #exemplifies (0.85) — Runnymede Trust (ed. Farah Elahi & Omar Khan), Islamophobia, 255
• The West monopolizes the position of observer over the observed non-West #corroborates (0.80) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 228
• Sectarian debate reduces opposing paradigms to mirror-inversions of each other. #exemplifies (0.80)