Colonial peoples are stereotyped as incapable of truth-telling

Evidence

In a later work Lewis tells us what terminology is more accurate and useful, although the terminology seems no less “Western” (whatever “Western” means): Muslims, like most other former colonial peoples, are incapable of telling the truth or even of seeing it. According to Lewis, they are addicted to mythology, along with “the so-called revisionist school in the United States, which look back to a golden age of American virtue and ascribe virtually all the sins and crimes of the world to the present establishment in their country.” Aside from being a mischievous and totally inaccurate account of revisionist history, this kind of remark is designed to put Lewis as a great historian above the petty underdevelopment of mere Muslims and revisionists. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 809

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the book’s colonial-psychology thread: the colonized as myth-addicted, incapable of objectivity — a move worth carrying into Islamophobia readings about epistemic condescension. — connects to: Colonial officials framed rule as emancipation from Africans’ own ignorance — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 242
• QUESTION: Worth chasing whether Lewis in fact said this, and how Said’s quotation of his ‘1964 polemic’ functions as evidence.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 809