Attributing every social development to Islam erases the role of colonialism and politics

Evidence

For Gibb Islam is Islamic orthodoxy, is also the community of believers, is life, unity, intelligibility, values. It is law and order too, the unsavory disruptions of jihadists and communist agitators notwithstanding. In page after page of Gibb’s prose in Whither Islam?, we learn that the new commercial banks in Egypt and Syria are facts of Islam or an Islamic initiative; schools and an increasing literacy rate are Islamic facts, too, as are journalism, Westernization, and intellectual societies. At no point does Gibb speak of European colonialism when he discusses the rise of nationalism and its “toxins.” That the history of modern Islam might be more intelligible for its resistance, political and nonpolitical, to colonialism, never occurs to Gibb, just as it seems to him finally irrelevant to note whether the “Islamic” governments he discusses are republican, feudal, or monarchical. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 711

Categorization

• XREF: Central to the later Islamophobia readings: the mechanism by which the Orientalist frame pre-emptively excludes colonial power and resistance from the analysis.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 711