Europe internalized Islam as a trauma woven into its cultural fabric

Evidence

Not for nothing did Islam come to symbolize terror, devastation, the demonic, hordes of hated barbarians. For Europe, Islam was a lasting trauma. Until the end of the seventeenth century the “Ottoman peril” lurked alongside Europe to represent for the whole of Christian civilization a constant danger, and in time European civilization incorporated that peril and its lore, its great events, figures, virtues, and vices, as something woven into the fabric of life. … The point is that what remained current about Islam was some necessarily diminished version of those great dangerous forces that it symbolized for Europe. Like Walter Scott’s Saracens, the European representation of the Muslim, Ottoman, or Arab was always a way of controlling the redoubtable Orient, and to a certain extent the same is true of the methods of contemporary learned Orientalists, whose subject is not so much the East itself as the East made known, and therefore less fearsome, to the Western reading public. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 164

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the core Orientalist move: representing the East to control it and make it less fearsome - a mechanism foundational to the toolkit.
• XREF: Directly scaffolds the Islamophobia readings to come: representation-as-domination is the key concept the reader must carry forward.
• SEED: The claim that ‘what remained current about Islam was a diminished version’ - angle for an essay on how media coverage of a source community always performs this reduction.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 164