European awareness of Islam stems from direct colonial and demographic experience

Evidence

For there is an extremely important distinction to be made between American and European awareness of Islam. France and England, for example, until very recently possessed large Muslim empires; in both countries, and to a lesser degree in Italy and Holland, both of which had Muslim colonies too, there is a long tradition of direct experience with the Islamic world. In addition, millions of Muslims from Africa and Asia now live in metropolitan France and Britain. This is reflected in a distinguished European academic discipline of Orientalism, which of course existed in those countries with colonies as well as those (Germany, Spain, prerevolutionary Russia) that either wanted them, or were close to Muslim territories, or were once Muslim states. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 126

Categorization

• XREF: Grounds the American-versus-European divide in colonial history — a comparative lens for any essay on how different Western powers each construct ‘Islam’. — connects to: The rescue-of-Muslim-women narrative originated in European colonialism — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 306

Related

• American obsession with Islam is secondhand because America lacks a colonial past (similarity 0.87)
• Western scholarship on Islam grew from positions of colonial dominance. (similarity 0.86)
• Said saw America’s Islam obsession as secondhand and its European form as more grounded (similarity 0.83)
• Contemporary anti-Western sentiment and Western Islamophobia both stem from the colonial legacy (similarity 0.83)
• Islam has been Europe’s defining other across centuries (similarity 0.83)
• American Islamophobia inherited European tropes but without Europe’s deep historical memory (similarity 0.83)
• Europe’s historical fear of Islam derived from its military expansion reaching multiple continents (similarity 0.82)
• Americans derived much of their Islamophobia from British colonial sources. (similarity 0.82)
• Colonization was not Islam-specific but Orientalism shaped its distinct form (similarity 0.82)
• Early Americans’ image of Islam derived secondhand from British sources (similarity 0.82)
• Colonisation was not specific to Islam or the Muslim world (similarity 0.82)
• Postwar Europe’s Muslim population traced to French and British colonial ties (similarity 0.82)
• European empires colonized Muslim states through loans as well as invasion. (similarity 0.82)
• Western ideological camps all reduce Islam to a scapegoat (similarity 0.82)
• European powers ruled over three quarters of the Muslim world by the 1920s (similarity 0.82)