British colonial rivals blamed Islam for Arab civilizational stasis

Evidence

If men were to study the situation of women in Egypt, he wrote, as men had already done in Europe, they would find that women are ‘the source of their decline and the cause of their ruin’. … The ideas, customs, and laws of the Arabs today were just as they had been one thousand years before. This sterility, said Harcourt, was due partly to the stifling effects of climate, but more to the element most uniform throughout the region, Islam. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 362

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘Oriental societies immobile for a thousand years’ trope echoes the civilizational-stasis argument that Said and others critique — and matches the deflating of civilizational narratives seen in the Armada book.