Desert fiction marked Arabs as fossils needing European stewardship
Evidence
In the genre of fiction known as “The Arab of the Desert,” the desert “symbolized the alleged unproductive, fossilized nature of the Arab and Muslim world,” which was in need of European stewardship. Because of their arrested development, the Arab, Turk, and African could not take care of themselves and needed outside help. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 407
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: The arrested-development claim links to de Wette’s ‘petrified’ Judaism in para 404 — showing the shared Semitic subhuman frame.
Related
- Desert-arab fiction justified European stewardship of the Muslim world. (similarity 0.91)
- The desert genre justified European stewardship over arrested peoples (similarity 0.88)
- Literary objectification dehumanizes Arabs even before they are killed (similarity 0.78)
- The desert environment was blamed for alleged Muslim irrationality and unreliability. (similarity 0.78)
Broader Connections
- Literary objectification dehumanizes Arabs even before they are killed
#expands(0.75) — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1172 - Secularist novelists freeze cultural evolution to make Islamophobic nostalgic purism
#corroborates(0.60) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 144