European curiosity was itself a theology-dependent mode, not natural unfetteredness

Evidence

But there is also the implication that this ‘attitude’ – if that is how it should be understood – was in some sense natural. Such curiosity, it seems to be suggested, is simply the unfettered relation of a person to the world, emerging in Europe once the ‘loosening of theological bonds’ had brought about ‘the freeing of human minds’. Fewer people would question this assumption. In fact I would argue that the notion of ‘theological bonds’ that loosen or become broken, leaving the individual confronted by the world, continues to govern our understanding of the historical encounter of the Middle East with the modern West, and even of political struggles in the Middle East today. The reason for my detour through this mischief is because I want to examine the way of addressing the world that Middle Eastern writers found in Europe as something not natural but mischievous – dependent, so to speak, on a certain theology of its own. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 59

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the ‘freed’ secular observer is itself a product of a particular theology — that the very notion of loosening theological bonds is a theological assumption smuggled into secular historiography — is a paradigm-shifting move the reader will sit with. It reframes the entire ‘natural curiosity’ narrative as its own worldview.
• QUESTION: What would it mean to actually trace the ‘theology’ internal to the modern stance of the detached observer? Mitchell gestures at it but doesn’t fully spell it out in this passage — worth chasing into chapter 1’s later arguments.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s prior interest in the construction of the observing subject — recalls the figure/ground and soundscape work on how perception itself is shaped by historical/technological conditions.