American obsession with Islam is secondhand because America lacks a colonial past

Evidence

The absence in America either of a colonial past or of a longstanding cultural attention to Islam makes the current obsession all the more peculiar, more abstract, more secondhand. Very few Americans, comparatively speaking, have actually had much to do with real Muslims; by comparison, in France the country’s second religion in point of numbers is Islam, which may not be more popular as a result, but is certainly more known. The modern European burst of interest in Islam was part of what was called “the Oriental renaissance,” a period in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when French and British scholars discovered “the East” anew — India, China, Japan, Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Holy Land. Islam was seen, for better or for worse, as part of the East, sharing in its mystery, exoticism, corruption, and latent power. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 127

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Said’s larger argument in Orientalism about how imperial history shapes knowledge of the East.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and the…, 127

Related

• Said saw America’s Islam obsession as secondhand and its European form as more grounded (similarity 0.89)
• European awareness of Islam stems from direct colonial and demographic experience (similarity 0.87)
• Western scholarship on Islam grew from positions of colonial dominance. (similarity 0.84)
• Western ideological camps all reduce Islam to a scapegoat (similarity 0.82)
• American Islamophobia inherited European tropes but without Europe’s deep historical memory (similarity 0.82)
• Westerners encounter Islam only through pre-framed political and media channels. (similarity 0.81)
• Early Americans’ image of Islam derived secondhand from British sources (similarity 0.81)
• No era since the Middle Ages has discussed Islam outside prejudice and politics (similarity 0.81)
• Orientalism is chiefly a British and French enterprise, later American. (similarity 0.81)
• British, French, then American Orientalism follows the rise and fall of colonial empires (similarity 0.81)
• The West is framed as having surpassed religion while Islam remains mired in it (similarity 0.80)
• Americans derived much of their Islamophobia from British colonial sources. (similarity 0.80)
• France’s geographic proximity to Muslim lands makes its Islamophobia more layered (similarity 0.80)
• Orientalism differs from Hellenism by accompanying colonial conquest (similarity 0.80)
• American Orientalism persists fragmentarily but ideologically coherently (similarity 0.79)