Colonial denigration of Islam drove anti-colonial movements to embrace Islam as resistance

Evidence

The easy alliances demonstrated in these three books between racism, neo-liberalism, the American politics of empire and Israeli politics of occupation reveal the tie that binds them: a wilful inattention to history. In culture-clash explanations, if fundamentalism has arisen in Muslim parts of the world, it is because that is how they are. We cannot begin to consider, as Yegenoglu does of veiling in Colonial Fantasies, how colonial policies in Algeria, for example, so denigrated everything Islamic that anti-colonial movements won popular support by proposing a return to Islamic tradition, a tradition understood largely as the opposite of the foreigners. Within the Manichean world created by colonialism, women’s bodies remained the terrain on which men sought to articulate their desires and fears. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 242

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the mechanism behind ‘reverse orientalism’ — the colonized revitalizing what the colonizer suppressed.
• XREF: Connects to Fanon’s account of the veil in Algeria and to Lila Abu-Lughod’s work. — connects to: Anti-colonial movements disproved the mosque-state-fusion Orientalist stereotype
• QUESTION: How far does the Algerian reverse-orientalism dynamic generalize to other colonial settings and contemporary ‘return to tradition’ movements?
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Sherene Razack, Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims…, 242