Early Europeans’ image of Muslims was fantasy serving self-critique and conquest

Evidence

Educated Europeans of the early Enlightenment inherited a view of foreign peoples which was part-fantasy and part-hearsay, little more than an exotic fiction with which to expose the venality of European life, as in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, or reportage shaped in such a way as to administer a crude justification for economic penetration and religious conquest, as in Richard Haklut or Samuel Purchase. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 348

Categorization

• QUESTION: Curious how Montesquieu’s Persian Letters actually used the ‘Persian’ mask to critique French society — worth chasing whether the monster figure here serves self-examination rather than othering.
• SEED: Angle: the Western ‘monster’ often exposes the West’s own venality — a self-indictment disguised as othering, which threads well into a piece on how fear functions as a mirror.