Arabia is treated as an eternal locale where past and present collapse into one

Evidence

Arabia has been an especially privileged place for the Orientalist, not only because Muslims treat Islam as Arabia’s genius loci, but also because the Hejaz appears historically as barren and retarded as it is geographically; the Arabian desert is thus considered to be a locale about which one can make statements regarding the past in exactly the same form (and with the same content) that one makes them regarding the present. In the Hejaz you can speak about Muslims, modern Islam, and primitive Islam without bothering to make distinctions. To this vocabulary devoid of historical grounding, Smith was able to bring the cachet of additional authority provided by his Semitic studies. What we hear in his comments is the standpoint of a scholar commanding all the antecedents for Islam, the Arabs, and Arabia. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 592

Categorization

• DEFINE: The conceptual mechanism of ‘ahistorical vocabulary’ — the collapse of historical distinctions into an eternal, timeless Orient — is a cornerstone of Orientalist representation.
• XREF: Connects directly to the imagined-community/nation thread and to how contemporary media speaks of ‘the Muslim world’ as timeless and undifferentiated; echoes the later Islamophobia readings.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how does Said’s ‘ahistorical vocabulary’ map onto biopolitics’ treatment of colonized populations as outside historical time, as in Mbembe’s necropolitics?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 592