Arab travelers perceived Europe as organized around arranging everything into a view

Evidence

Characteristic of the way Europeans seemed to live was their preoccupation with what the same Egyptian author described as intizam al-manzar, the organisation of the view. The Europe one reads about in Arabic accounts was a place of discipline and visual arrangement, of silent gazes and strange simulations, of the organisation of everything and everything organised to represent, to recall like the exhibition some larger meaning. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 80

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the concept intizam al-manzar, the organisation of the view, as an Arabic traveler’s label for the distinctive European arrangement of the world into a representational system.
• SEED: The concept of intizam al-manzar could anchor an essay on how colonized observers diagnosed the European ‘gaze’ as an organizing principle decades before Foucault formalized the panopticon.